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Three-dimensional simulation of a new cooling strategy for proton exchange membrane fuel cell stack using a non-isothermal multiphase model
In this study, a new cooling strategy for a proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cell stack is investigated using a three-dimensional (3D) multiphase non-isothermal model. The new cooling strategy follows that of the Honda's Clarity design and further extends to a cooling unit every five cells in stacks. The stack consists of 5 fuel cells sharing the inlet and outlet manifolds for reactant gas flows. Each cell has 7-path serpentine flow fields with a counter-flow configuration arranged for hydrogen and air streams. The coolant flow fields are set at the two sides of the stack and are simplified as the convective heat transfer thermal boundary conditions. This study also compares two thermal boundary conditions, namely limited and infinite coolant flow rates, and their impacts on the distributions of oxygen, liquid water, current density and membrane hydration. The difference of local temperature between these two cooling conditions is as much as 6.9 K in the 5-cell stack, while it is only 1.7 K in a single cell. In addition, the increased vapor concentration at high temperature (and hence water saturation pressure) dilutes the oxygen content in the air flow, reducing local oxygen concentration. The higher temperature in the stack also causes low membrane hydration, and consequently poor cell performance and non-uniform current density distribution, as disclosed by the simulation. The work indicates the new cooling strategy can be optimized by increasing the heat transfer coefficient between the stack and coolant to mitigate local overheating and cell performance reduction
Biodegradable Polylactic Acid (PLA) Microstructures for Scaffold Applications
In this research, we present a simple and cost effective soft lithographic
process to fabricate PLA scaffolds for tissue engineering. In which, the
negative photoresist JSR THB-120N was spun on a glass subtract followed by
conventional UV lithographic processes to fabricate the master to cast the PDMS
elastomeric mold. A thin poly(vinyl alcohol) (PVA) layer was used as a mode
release such that the PLA scaffold can be easily peeled off. The PLA precursor
solution was then cast onto the PDMS mold to form the PLA microstructures.
After evaporating the solvent, the PLA microstructures can be easily peeled off
from the PDMS mold. Experimental results show that the desired microvessels
scaffold can be successfully transferred to the biodegradable polymer PLA.Comment: Submitted on behalf of EDA Publishing Association
(http://irevues.inist.fr/EDA-Publishing
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Robust filtering for gene expression time series data with variance constraints
This is the post print version of the article. The official published version can be obtained from the link below - Copyright 2007 Taylor & Francis Ltd.In this paper, an uncertain discrete-time stochastic system is employed to represent a model for gene regulatory networks from time series data. A robust variance-constrained filtering problem is investigated for a gene expression model with stochastic disturbances and norm-bounded parameter uncertainties, where the stochastic perturbation is in the form of a scalar Gaussian white noise with constant variance and the parameter uncertainties enter both the system matrix and the output matrix. The purpose of the addressed robust filtering problem is to design a linear filter such that, for the admissible bounded uncertainties, the filtering error system is Schur stable and the individual error variance is less than a prespecified upper bound. By using the linear matrix inequality (LMI) technique, sufficient conditions are first derived for ensuring the desired filtering performance for the gene expression model. Then the filter gain is characterized in terms of the solution to a set of LMIs, which can easily be solved by using available software packages. A simulation example is exploited for a gene expression model in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed design procedures.This work was supported in part by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) of the UK under Grants GR/S27658/01 and EP/C524586/1, the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) of the UK under Grants BB/C506264/1 and 100/EGM17735, the Nuffield Foundation of the UK under Grant NAL/00630/G, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany
Nonlinear response and scaling law in the vortex state of d-wave superconductors
We study the field dependence of the quasi-particle density of states, the
thermodynamics and the transport properties in the vortex state of d-wave
superconductors when a magnetic field is applied perpendicular to the
conducting plane, specially for the low field and the low temperature compared
to the upper critical field and transition temperature, respectively, and . Both the superfluid density and the spin
susceptibility exhibit the characteristic -field dependence, while
the nuclear spin lattice relaxation rate T and the thermal
conductivity are linear in field . With increasing temperature, these
quantities exhibit the scaling behavior in . The present theory
applies to 2D -wave superconductor as well; a possible candidate of the
superconductivity in SrRuO.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figure
Automatic Brain Tumor Segmentation using Convolutional Neural Networks with Test-Time Augmentation
Automatic brain tumor segmentation plays an important role for diagnosis,
surgical planning and treatment assessment of brain tumors. Deep convolutional
neural networks (CNNs) have been widely used for this task. Due to the
relatively small data set for training, data augmentation at training time has
been commonly used for better performance of CNNs. Recent works also
demonstrated the usefulness of using augmentation at test time, in addition to
training time, for achieving more robust predictions. We investigate how
test-time augmentation can improve CNNs' performance for brain tumor
segmentation. We used different underpinning network structures and augmented
the image by 3D rotation, flipping, scaling and adding random noise at both
training and test time. Experiments with BraTS 2018 training and validation set
show that test-time augmentation helps to improve the brain tumor segmentation
accuracy and obtain uncertainty estimation of the segmentation results.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures, MICCAI BrainLes 201
An unexpectedly low-redshift excess of Swift gamma-ray burst rate
Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are the most violent explosions in the Universe and
can be used to explore the properties of high-redshift universe. It is believed
that the long GRBs are associated with the deaths of massive stars. So it is
possible to use GRBs to investigate the star formation rate (SFR). In this
paper, we use Lynden-Bell's method to study the luminosity function and
rate of \emph{Swift} long GRBs without any assumptions. We find that the
luminosity of GRBs evolves with redshift as with
. After correcting the redshift evolution through
, the luminosity function can be expressed as
for dim GRBs and for bright GRBs, with the break point
. We also find that the formation
rate of GRBs is almost constant at for the first time, which is
remarkably different from the SFR. At , the formation rate of GRB is
consistent with the SFR. Our results are dramatically different from previous
studies. Some possible reasons for this low-redshift excess are discussed. We
also test the robustness of our results with Monte Carlo simulations. The
distributions of mock data (i.e., luminosity-redshift distribution, luminosity
function, cumulative distribution and distribution) are in good
agreement with the observations. Besides, we also find that there are
remarkable difference between the mock data and the observations if long GRB
are unbiased tracers of SFR at .Comment: 33 pages, 10 figures, 1 table, accepted by ApJ
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