Evaluating of the disinfection and water quality effects on UV application in the primary stage of water treatment

Background: Irradiation of water by UV has been considered as an attractive alternative for disinfection because its low-impact, pathogen killing capacity shows tremendous promise for meeting today's drinking water regulatory requirements. This study has been performed with the objective of utilizing medium pressure lamp in the preliminary stage of municipal water treatment, namely prior to water clarification and filtration. Methods: Raw water samples were irradiated for 30 s in a lab-scale closed reactor. Disinfection results showed nearly 2 log reduction in HPC for all the samples without formation of nitrite in excess of its MCL. As in a few previous works the formation of nitrite as an objectionable DBP had been reported, this study was extended by preparing synthetic water samples having different amounts of nitrate and turbidities. Results: As far as the initial nitrate concentration dose not exceed 10 mg/L N-NO3, there would be no risk of nitrite increasing in excess of the MCL. Conclusion: Meeting the goal of at least 90 % disinfection for water samples with turbidity levels of as high as 750 NTU is possible by utilizing medium- pressure UV lamp

The Effect of Raindrop Impact on Runoff and Soil Loss from Rills under Different Rainfall Intensities

Introduction  Rill erosion is one of the main factors of soil degradation, especially in rainfed lands in semi-arid regions. These soils have relatively lower organic matter content with weakly-aggregated units, which increases their susceptibility to water erosion processes. Conventional tillage systems are adversely affect on soil structure and surface soil cover in rainfed lands. Raindrop energy and flow shear stress are the main erosive factors in the slope lands. The raindrop impact destroys soil structure and changes it to erodible unites; micro-aggregates and single particles, and so makes them to more detachment. A few studies have been done on the role of raindrop impact to soil erosion by water. Nevertheless, there is no sufficient information on the effect of raindrop impact on soil loss in the rills particularly in semi-arid regions. Therefore, this study was conducted to investigate the role of raindrop impact on soil loss from rills in various soil textures under different rainfall intensities.   Materials and Methods  A laboratory experiment was performed on two soil textures (clay loam and sandy loam) under four rainfall intensities (30, 50, 72 and 83 mm.h-1) in two rainfall conditions (under raindrops impact and without raindrops impact). Soil samples (0-30 cm) were taken from a semi-arid region in Zanjan province in 2020. The experiments were set up in an erosion flume with 100 cm long and 60 cm width and 15 cm depth which were exposed to simulated rainfalls for 30 min duration. Runoff and soil loss were measured at three rills under slope gradient 10% in the two rainfall conditions for each rainfall intensity. Soil loss from rills was determined as the mass of sediment collected from rill outlet per rill surface area (g.m-2). Under raindrop impact, the soil was exposed directly to raindrop impact and under without raindrop impact, a metal mesh sheet was used to eliminate raindrops impact to soil surface. The role of raindrops impact to runoff and soil loss was computed from the difference of runoff and soil loss under raindrops impact and without raindrops impacts. A t-test was used to assess the role of raindrops impact between the two rainfall conditions for the soils and rainfall intensities.     Results and Discussion  Results indicated that runoff production and soil loss were significantly affected by the soil texture and rainfall intensity. Runoff and soil loss under raindrops impact increased in the soils with increasing rainfall intensity. Clay loam showed more runoff production and soil loss than sandy loam which was associated to lower aggregate stability and hydraulic conductivity. Runoff and soil loss in the two soils and four rainfall intensities were significantly affected by raindrops impact. Runoff production and soil loss except to 72 mm.h-1 rainfall intensity were very higher under raindrop impact than without raindrop impact. It seems under 72 mm.h-1 rainfall intensity, raindrops impact varied the rill’s morphology and prevent more runoff production. Runoff production in clay loam and sandy loam under raindrop impact were increased by 44 and 36 percent, respectively (p< 0.01). Soil loss resulted by raindrop impact in clay loam and sandy loam increased by 53 and 62 percent, respectively (p< 0.01). Raindrops impact had more importance in soil loss rather than runoff production. This result is related to the role of raindrops impact in destroying aggregates and producing more erodible soil particles and closing soil macrospores and declining water infiltration. The role of raindrop impact in runoff production and soil loss varied among the rainfall intensities. A slight reduction in the role of raindrop impact in runoff and soil loss was occurred with increasing rainfall intensity, especially in sandy loam.   Conclusion  The role of raindrop impact in runoff production and soil loss was significantly affected by soil type and rainfall intensity. Raindrops impact has more important in runoff and soil loss in the soils having higher aggregate stability and more hydraulic conductivity. The role of raindrop impact in runoff and soil loss in these soils declines with increasing rainfall intensity. In general, maintain soil surface cover is essential to control raindrops impact and decrease runoff and soil loss in semi-arid areas. The importance of soil surface cover is most obvious under different rainfalls in weakly-aggregated soils which are dominant in many slope lands. Also, soil surface cover has important role in controlling runoff and soil loss under heavy rainfalls in soils with more water-stable aggregates. Prevention from intensive tillage and using conservation tillage systems such as minimum tillage are effective strategies in controlling raindrop impact in rainfed lands in semi-arid regions

Cellular, Wide-Area, and Non-Terrestrial IoT: A Survey on 5G Advances and the Road Towards 6G

The next wave of wireless technologies is proliferating in connecting things among themselves as well as to humans. In the era of the Internet of things (IoT), billions of sensors, machines, vehicles, drones, and robots will be connected, making the world around us smarter. The IoT will encompass devices that must wirelessly communicate a diverse set of data gathered from the environment for myriad new applications. The ultimate goal is to extract insights from this data and develop solutions that improve quality of life and generate new revenue. Providing large-scale, long-lasting, reliable, and near real-time connectivity is the major challenge in enabling a smart connected world. This paper provides a comprehensive survey on existing and emerging communication solutions for serving IoT applications in the context of cellular, wide-area, as well as non-terrestrial networks. Specifically, wireless technology enhancements for providing IoT access in fifth-generation (5G) and beyond cellular networks, and communication networks over the unlicensed spectrum are presented. Aligned with the main key performance indicators of 5G and beyond 5G networks, we investigate solutions and standards that enable energy efficiency, reliability, low latency, and scalability (connection density) of current and future IoT networks. The solutions include grant-free access and channel coding for short-packet communications, non-orthogonal multiple access, and on-device intelligence. Further, a vision of new paradigm shifts in communication networks in the 2030s is provided, and the integration of the associated new technologies like artificial intelligence, non-terrestrial networks, and new spectra is elaborated. Finally, future research directions toward beyond 5G IoT networks are pointed out.Comment: Submitted for review to IEEE CS&

Diagnostic Accuracy of Sixty Four Multi-Slice CT Angiography in Assessment of Arterial Cut-Off and Run-Off in Comparison with Surgical Findings

Background/Objective: The accurate anatomic mapping and determination of the severity of arterial disease, an important health problem of the elderly, is of great significance. We aimed to determine the diagnostic value of 64-multislice CT angiography (MSCTA) in run-off and cut-off sites of arterial disease. Patients and Methods: Throughout the study, MSCTA followed by an operative intervention was carried out on a total of 38 patients with clinical signs and symptoms suggestive of arterial disease (AD) all of whom had the indication for vascular surgery. The mean age of patients was 34±15.86 (range, 23 to 93) years. MSCTA was executed using a 64-slice CT scanner, during the arterial phase of injecting the nonionic, contrast medium with a power injector at the rate of 5 ml/sec into the antecubital vein and exploration and revascularization of peripheral arterial disease was performed intraoperatively. Results: Atherosclerosis and arterial disease, the most common causes of vascular occlusion, were more common in the lower extremities. According to MSCTA findings, the most frequent site of stenosis was the superficial femoral artery. Spearman’s correlation coefficient showed a high degree of agreement amongst the raters. The sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value (PPV), negative predictive value (NPV) and the accuracy of MSCTA compared to surgery were 83.8%, 96%, 96.8%, 81.3% and 89%, respectively. MSCTA findings were compared with surgery as a standard of reference, which showed concordance in the majority of cases (81.6%). Cut-off sites were correctly identified by MSCTA in 97.3% of the patients and the most common sites of discordance were the run-off sites (18.2%). Conclusion: MSCTA angiography as a novel diagnostic modality may be a suitable alternative and a viable choice for routine clinical diagnosis

Deep Multi-modality Soft-decoding of Very Low Bit-rate Face Videos

We propose a novel deep multi-modality neural network for restoring very low bit rate videos of talking heads. Such video contents are very common in social media, teleconferencing, distance education, tele-medicine, etc., and often need to be transmitted with limited bandwidth. The proposed CNN method exploits the correlations among three modalities, video, audio and emotion state of the speaker, to remove the video compression artifacts caused by spatial down sampling and quantization. The deep learning approach turns out to be ideally suited for the video restoration task, as the complex non-linear cross-modality correlations are very difficult to model analytically and explicitly. The new method is a video post processor that can significantly boost the perceptual quality of aggressively compressed talking head videos, while being fully compatible with all existing video compression standards.Comment: Accepted by Proceedings of the 28th ACM International Conference on Multimedia(ACM MM),202

Transgenic Microalgae With Increased Production Of At Least One Omega-3 Long Chain Polyunsaturated Fatty Acid (Patent US 2018/0312888 A1)

The invention relates to genetically modified organisms with enhanced production of omega-3 long chain polyunsaturated fatty acids

Recombinant Organisms (Patent US 2015/0275243 A1)

The invention relates to genetically modified organisms with enhanced production of omega-3 long chain polyunsaturated fatty acids

Recombinant Organisms (Patent WO 2014/053821 A1)

The invention relates to genetically modified organisms with enhanced production of omega-3 long chain polyunsaturated fatty acids