Chemical Fractionation Of Cu And Zn And Their Impacts On Microbial Properties In Slightly Contaminated Soils

Chemical fractionation of Cu and Zn in bulk soil and its effects on soil microbial properties were determined in Cu and Zn contaminated soils (Cu: 35.57~46.37 mg·kg-1, Zn: 74.33~127.20 mg·kg-1) sampled from an agricultural field in outskirts of Zibo, China during the month of September, 2011. A sequential extraction technique (SET) was used for metals chemical fractionation analysis in soils and a correlation analysis was applied to determinate the effects of metal on soil microbial properties. Chemical speciation showed that Cu and Zn were mostly present in the residual fraction and their concentrations in the most labile fraction (acid soluble fraction) were the lowest in the investigated soils. However, the correlation analysis indicated that the labile forms of Cu/Zn, such as its acid soluble, reducible or oxidizable fractions, were usually significantly negatively correlated with the tested microbial activities at 0.05 or 0.01 probability levels. These results indicate that the metal labile fractions could exert an inhibitory effect on the soil microbial parameters even in the minor contaminated soils. Int. J. Agril. Res. Innov. & Tech. 3 (1): 20-25, June, 2013 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3329/ijarit.v3i1.1604

Robust Switching Control Strategy for a Transmission System with Unknown Backlash

This paper proposes a robust switching control strategy for a transmission system with unknown backlash. Firstly, the adverse effects of backlash nonlinearity in the transmission system are analyzed. Then the backlash model and different operating modes of the transmission system with backlash are investigated. For each operating mode, an individual controller is designed to make the system robust against the unknown backlash and various frequencies of the input signal. Moreover, a supervisory controller is proposed to estimate the current mode of the transmission system and coordinate the controller switching between different modes. Simulations are done to verify that our switching control strategy can efficiently reduce the oscillation caused by backlash and is quite robust against the variation of the frequency of the input signal

Dense 3D Facial Reconstruction from a Single Depth Image in Unconstrained Environment

With the increasing demands of applications in virtual reality such as 3D films, virtual Human-Machine Interactions and virtual agents, the analysis of 3D human face analysis is considered to be more and more important as a fundamental step for those virtual reality tasks. Due to information provided by an additional dimension, 3D facial reconstruction enables aforementioned tasks to be achieved with higher accuracy than those based on 2D facial analysis. The denser the 3D facial model is, the more information it could provide. However, most existing dense 3D facial reconstruction methods require complicated processing and high system cost. To this end, this paper presents a novel method that simplifies the process of dense 3D facial reconstruction by employing only one frame of depth data obtained with an off-the-shelf RGB-D sensor. The experiments showed competitive results with real world data