Research on forming quality of poly-wedge pulley spinning

As an important power transmission part, pulleys are widely used in automobile industry, agricultural machinery, pumps and machines. A near-net forming process for six-wedge belt pulleys manufacturing was put forward. For this purpose, the required tooth shape and size can be formed directly by spinning without machining. The whole manufacturing procedures include blanking, drawing and spinning. The spinning procedure includes five processes, performing, drumming, thickening, toothing and finishing. The forming defects occurred during each forming processes of poly-wedge pulley spinning, such as the drumming failure, flanged opening-end, folded side-wall, insufficient bottom size, flashed opening-end, cutting-off bottom, are introduced, and the factors influencing the defects are analyzed. The corresponding preventive measures are put forward

Design of Virtual Objects Using Transformation Optics

Two structures of virtual targets filled with metamaterials are investigated through transformation optics to tailor the specific electromagnetic fields into desired spatial patterns. One virtual structure is a square column object transformed from a dielectric cylinder and the other virtual structure is a cylinder object transformed from a dielectric square column. Because the electromagnetic parameters in the virtual objects are obtained from real objects by the method of transformation optics, the scattering fields of virtual structures are the same as those of the real objects. The numerical simulations further prove the correction of theoretical results

Molecular docking studies on rocaglamide, a traditional Chinese medicine for periodontitis

Purpose: To undertake an in silico assessment of rocaglamide as a potential drug therapy forperiodontitis (dental arthritis).Method: Lamarckian algorithm-based automated docking approach using AutoDock4.2 tool wasapplied for calculating the best possible binding mode of rocaglamide to IL-23p19 and IL-17, the targets of anti-inflammatory drugs in periodontal disease.Results: The top two interactions of rocaglamide with IL-17 (ΔG = -5.45 and -4.83 kcal/mol) were more spontaneous, and the physical interactions (two hydrogen bonds and one π-πbond) generated in the two IL-17- rocaglamide complexes were higher in number than in IL-23p14-rocaglamide complexes.Conclusion: In silico analysis of rocaglamide, a known antimicrobial and anti-inflammatory agent, is a promising natural candidate for periodontitis therapy, and should be further subjected to in vitro and in vivo anti-periodontitis investigations.Keywords: Periodontitis, Inflammation, Rocaglamide, Molecular docking, Lamarckian algorithm, IL- 23p19, IL-1

An Adaptive Dynamic Surface Controller for Ultralow Altitude Airdrop Flight Path Angle with Actuator Input Nonlinearity

In the process of ultralow altitude airdrop, many factors such as actuator input dead-zone, backlash, uncertain external atmospheric disturbance, and model unknown nonlinearity affect the precision of trajectory tracking. In response, a robust adaptive neural network dynamic surface controller is developed. As a result, the aircraft longitudinal dynamics with actuator input nonlinearity is derived; the unknown nonlinear model functions are approximated by means of the RBF neural network. Also, an adaption strategy is used to achieve robustness against model uncertainties. Finally, it has been proved that all the signals in the closed-loop system are bounded and the tracking error converges to a small residual set asymptotically. Simulation results demonstrate the perfect tracking performance and strong robustness of the proposed method, which is not only applicable to the actuator with input dead-zone but also suitable for the backlash nonlinearity. At the same time, it can effectively overcome the effects of dead-zone and the atmospheric disturbance on the system and ensure the fast track of the desired flight path angle instruction, which overthrows the assumption that system functions must be known

Mobility Census for the analysis of rapid urban development

Traditionally urban structure and development are monitored using infrequent high-quality datasets such as censuses. However, human culture is accelerating and aggregating, leading to ever-larger cities and an increased pace of urban development. Our modern interconnected world also provides us with new data sources that can be leveraged in the study of cities. However, these often noisy and unstructured sources of big data pose new challenges. Here we propose a method to extract meaningful explanatory variables and classifications from such data. Using movement data from Beijing, which is produced as a byproduct of mobile communication, we show that meaningful features can be extracted, revealing for example the emergence and absorption of subcenters. In the future this method will allow the analysis of urban dynamics at a high spatial resolution (here, 500m) and near real-time frequency

Generation of marker- and/or backbone-free transgenic wheat plants via Agrobacterium-mediated transformation

Horizontal transfer of antibiotic resistance genes to animals and vertical transfer of herbicide resistance genes to the weedy relatives are perceived as major biosafety concerns in genetically modified (GM) crops. In this study, five novel vectors which used gusA and bar as a reporter gene and a selection marker gene, respectively, were constructed based on the pCLEAN dual binary vector system. Among these vectors, 1G7B and 5G7B carried two T-DNAs located on two respective plasmids with 5G7B possessing an additional virGwt gene. 5LBTG154 and 5TGTB154 carried two T-DNAs in the target plasmid with either one or double right borders, and 5BTG154 carried the selectable marker gene on the backbone outside of the T-DNA left border in the target plasmid. In addition, 5BTG154, 5LBTG154, and 5TGTB154 used pAL154 as a helper plasmid which contains Komari fragment to facilitate transformation. These five dual binary vector combinations were transformed into Agrobacterium strain AGL1 and used to transform durum wheat cv Stewart 63. Evaluation of the co-transformation efficiencies, the frequencies of marker-free transgenic plants, and integration of backbone sequences in the obtained transgenic lines indicated that two vectors (5G7B and 5TGTB154) were more efficient in generating marker-free transgenic wheat plants with no or minimal integration of backbone sequences in the wheat genome. The vector series developed in this study for generation of marker- and/or backbone-free transgenic wheat plants via Agrobacterium-mediated transformation will be useful to facilitate the creation of “clean” GM wheat containing only the foreign genes of agronomic importance

Wasserstein Distance guided Adversarial Imitation Learning with Reward Shape Exploration

The generative adversarial imitation learning (GAIL) has provided an adversarial learning framework for imitating expert policy from demonstrations in high-dimensional continuous tasks. However, almost all GAIL and its extensions only design a kind of reward function of logarithmic form in the adversarial training strategy with the Jensen-Shannon (JS) divergence for all complex environments. The fixed logarithmic type of reward function may be difficult to solve all complex tasks, and the vanishing gradients problem caused by the JS divergence will harm the adversarial learning process. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm named Wasserstein Distance guided Adversarial Imitation Learning (WDAIL) for promoting the performance of imitation learning (IL). There are three improvements in our method: (a) introducing the Wasserstein distance to obtain more appropriate measure in the adversarial training process, (b) using proximal policy optimization (PPO) in the reinforcement learning stage which is much simpler to implement and makes the algorithm more efficient, and (c) exploring different reward function shapes to suit different tasks for improving the performance. The experiment results show that the learning procedure remains remarkably stable, and achieves significant performance in the complex continuous control tasks of MuJoCo.Comment: M. Zhang and Y. Wang contribute equally to this wor