Exposure to hazardous volatile organic compounds, PM 10 and CO while walking along streets in urban Guangzhou, China

Toxic air pollutants in street canyons are important issues concerning public health especially in some large Asian cities like Guangzhou. In 1998 <18% of Guangzhou citizens used public transportation modes, with a majority commuting on foot (42%) or by bicycle (22%). Of the pedestrians, 57% were either senior citizens or students. In the present study, we measured toxic air pollutants while walking along urban streets in Guangzhou to evaluate pedestrian exposure. Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) were collected with sorbent tubes, and PM 10 and CO were measured simultaneously with portable analyzers. Our results showed that pedestrian exposure to PM 10 (with an average of 303 μg m -3 for all samples) and some toxic VOCs (for example, benzene) was relatively high. Monocyclic aromatic hydrocarbons were found to be the most abundant VOCs, and 71% of the samples had benzene levels higher than 30 μg m -3. Benzene, PM 10 and CO in walk-only streets were significantly lower (p<0.05) than in traffic streets, and the differences in exposure levels between new urban streets and old urban streets were highly significant (p<0.01). Pedestrian exposure to toxic VOCs and PM 10 was higher than those reported in other public transportation modes (bus and subway). The good correlations between BTEX, PM 10 and CO in the streets indicated that automotive emission might be their major source. Our study also showed that the risk to pedestrians due to air pollution was misinterpreted by the reported air quality index based on measurement of SO 2, NO x and PM 10 in the government monitoring stations. An urban roadside monitoring station might be needed by air quality monitoring networks in large Asian cities like Guangzhou, in order to survey exposure to air toxics in urban roadside microenvironments. © 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

A review of process advancement of novel metal spinning

Metal spinning technology has seen a rapid development in recent years. Novel spinning processes, such as non-axisymmetrical spinning, non-circular cross-section spinning and tooth-shaped spinning, are being developed. This has challenged the limitation of traditional spinning technology being used for manufacturing axisymmetrical, circular cross-section, and uniform wall-thickness parts. In this paper, the classification of the traditional spinning processes is proposed based on the material deformation characteristics, the relative position between roller and blank, mandrel spinning and mandrel-free spinning, and temperature of the blank during spinning. The advancement of recently developed novel spinning processes and corresponding tool design and equipment development are reviewed. The classification of the novel spinning processes is proposed based on the relative position between the rotating axes, the geometry of cross-section and the variation of wall-thickness of the spun parts. The material deformation mechanism, processing failures and spun part defects of the aforementioned three groups of novel spinning processes are discussed by analyzing four representative spinning processes of industrial applications. Furthermore, other novel spinning processes and their classification as reported in the literature are summarized

Hybridization-induced magnetism in correlated cerium systems

There is a great change in the nature of the magnetic ordering on going from CeIn3, a local moment antiferromagnetic system, to CePb3, a heavy fermion itinerant antiferromagnetic system, both of which have Cu3Au crystal structure. We have applied ab initio electronic structure calculations, based on the linear-muffin-tin-orbital method, and a phenomenological theory of orbitally driven magnetic ordering, to study the effects of the band-f hybridization-induced interactions and the band-f exchange-induced interactions, pertinent to the magnetic behavior of these systems. The position of the Ce 4 f energy level relative to the Fermi energy and the intra-atomic Coulomb interaction are obtained from a sequence of three total-energy supercell calculations with two, one and zero f electrons in the Ce 4 f core. The calculations elucidate the origins in the electronic structure of the variation of the f-state resonance width characterizing the strength of the hybridization and the density of states at the Fermi energy characterizing the number and character of band states available for hybridization. We present results for the hybridization potential and the hybridization-induced exchange interactions on going from CeIn3 to CePb3, where the only obvious change is the addition of an anion p electron

Coulomb effects on the formation of proton halo nuclei

The exotic structures in the 2s_{1/2} states of five pairs of mirror nuclei ^{17}O-^{17}F, ^{26}Na-^{26}P, ^{27}Mg-^{27}P, ^{28}Al-^{28}P and ^{29}Si-^{29}P are investigated with the relativistic mean-field (RMF) theory and the single-particle model (SPM) to explore the role of the Coulomb effects on the proton halo formation. The present RMF calculations show that the exotic structure of the valence proton is more obvious than that of the valence neutron of its mirror nucleus, the difference of exotic size between each mirror nuclei becomes smaller with the increase of mass number A of the mirror nuclei and the ratios of the valence proton and valence neutron root-mean-square (RMS) radius to the matter radius in each pair of mirror nuclei all decrease linearly with the increase of A. In order to interpret these results, we analyze two opposite effects of Coulomb interaction on the exotic structure formation with SPM and find that the contribution of the energy level shift is more important than that of the Coulomb barrier for light nuclei. However, the hindrance of the Coulomb barrier becomes more obvious with the increase of A. When A is larger than 34, Coulomb effects on the exotic structure formation will almost become zero because its two effects counteract with each other.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures. One colum

Structural, magnetic and transport properties in the Cu-doped manganites La0.85Te0.15Mn1-xCuxO3 (0 \leq x \leq 0.20)

The effect of Cu-doping at Mn-site on structural, magnetic and transport properties in electron-doped manganites La0.85Te0.15Mn1-xCuxO3 has been investigated. Based on the analysis of structural parameter variations, the valence state of the Cu ion in Cu-doped manganites is suggested to be +2. All samples undergo the paramagnetic-ferromagnetic (PM-FM) phase transition. The Curie temperature decreases and the transition becomes broader with increasing Cu-doping level, in contrast, the magnetization magnitude of Cu-doping samples at low temperatures increase as x \leq 0.15. The insulator-metal (I-M) transition moves to lower temperatures with increasing Cu-doping content and disappears as x > 0.1. In addition, the higher temperature resistivity r peak in double-peak-like r(T) curves observed in no Cu-doping sample is completely suppressed as Cu-doping level x = 0.1 and r(T) curve only shows single I-M transition at the low temperature well below . The results are discussed according to the change of magnetic exchange interaction caused by Cu-doping.Comment: 17 pages, 5 figures. Phys.Rev.B (to be published

A framework for distributed managing uncertain data in RFID traceability networks

The ability to track and trace individual items, especially through large-scale and distributed networks, is the key to realizing many important business applications such as supply chain management, asset tracking, and counterfeit detection. Networked RFID (radio frequency identification), which uses the Internet to connect otherwise isolated RFID systems and software, is an emerging technology to support traceability applications. Despite its promising benefits, there remains many challenges to be overcome before these benefits can be realized. One significant challenge centers around dealing with uncertainty of raw RFID data. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to effectively manage the uncertainty of RFID data in large scale traceability networks. The framework consists of a global object tracking model and a local RFID data cleaning model. In particular, we propose a Markov-based model for tracking objects globally and a particle filter based approach for processing noisy, low-level RFID data locally. Our implementation validates the proposed approach and the experimental results show its effectiveness.Jiangang Ma, Quan Z. Sheng, Damith Ranasinghe, Jen Min Chuah and Yanbo W

Multidimensional Conservation Laws: Overview, Problems, and Perspective

Some of recent important developments are overviewed, several longstanding open problems are discussed, and a perspective is presented for the mathematical theory of multidimensional conservation laws. Some basic features and phenomena of multidimensional hyperbolic conservation laws are revealed, and some samples of multidimensional systems/models and related important problems are presented and analyzed with emphasis on the prototypes that have been solved or may be expected to be solved rigorously at least for some cases. In particular, multidimensional steady supersonic problems and transonic problems, shock reflection-diffraction problems, and related effective nonlinear approaches are analyzed. A theory of divergence-measure vector fields and related analytical frameworks for the analysis of entropy solutions are discussed.Comment: 43 pages, 3 figure

Strongly Correlated Cerium Systems: Non-Kondo Mechanism for Moment Collapse

We present an ab initio based method which gives clear insight into the interplay between the hybridization, the coulomb exchange, and the crystal-field interactions, as the degree of 4f localization is varied across a series of strongly correlated cerium systems. The results for the ordered magnetic moments, magnetic structure, and ordering temperatures are in excellent agreement with experiment, including the occurence of a moment collapse of non-Kondo origin. In contrast, standard ab initio density functional calculations fail to predict, even qualitatively, the trend of the unusual magentic properties.Comment: A shorter version of this has been submitted to PR