Investigation into high-temperature corrosion in a large-scale municipal waste-to-energy plant

High-temperature corrosion in the superheater of a large-scale waste-to-energy plant was investigated. A comparison of nickel-/iron-based alloys and austenitic stainless steel probes placed in the furnace demonstrated that temperature and particle deposition greatly influence corrosion. Nickel-based alloys performed better than the other metal alloys, though an aluminide coating further increased their corrosion resistance. Sacrificial baffles provided additional room for deposit accumulation, resulting in vigorous deposit-induced corrosion. Computational modelling (FLUENT code) was used to simulate flow characteristics and heat transfer. This study has shown that the use of aluminide coatings is a promising technique for minimising superheater corrosion in such facilities. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Hard-Loop Effective Action for Anisotropic Plasmas

We generalize the hard-thermal-loop effective action of the equilibrium quark-gluon plasma to a non-equilibrium system which is space-time homogeneous but for which the parton momentum distribution is anisotropic. We show that the manifestly gauge-invariant Braaten-Pisarski form of the effective action can be straightforwardly generalized and we verify that it then generates all n-point functions following from collisionless gauge-covariant transport theory for a homogeneous anisotropic plasma. On the other hand, the Taylor-Wong form of the hard-thermal-loop effective action has a more complicated generalization to the anisotropic case. Already in the simplest case of anisotropic distribution functions, it involves an additional term that is gauge invariant by itself, but nontrivial also in the static limit.Comment: 12 pages. Version 3: typo in (15) corrected, note added discussing metric conventions use

Comparative immunoprofiling of polymyositis and dermatomyositis muscles

The morphological, immunohistochemical, and immunopathological analyses of muscle biopsy are essential for the diagnosis of idiopathic inflammatory myopathies (IIMs). However, they are also one of the most common causes of misdiagnosis. Although several diagnostic criteria have been proposed for the diagnosis of IIMs, misdiagnosis still remains common in clinical practice. The present study aims to characterize the inflammatory profile of IIMs, including the expression of MHC-I, MHC-II, MAC and infiltrating cells. We also investigated the sensitivity and specificity of MHC-I and MHC-II immunostaining for the diagnosis of IIMs. We found that the expression of MHC-I and MHC-II was both higher in IIMs than in non-inflammatory myopathies (NIMs). The distribution of MHC-I in IIMs is different from that of MHC-II. MHC-I is mainly located in the sarcoplasms, while MHC-II is located mostly on the sarcolemmas. Moreover, our findings suggest that MAC may be a potential marker to diagnose DM, and the combination of MHC-I and MHC-II immunostaining results in a higher sensitivity and specificity for IIM diagnosis, especially for DM. In addition, infiltrating cells in PM were mainly CD8+ cells, but we found in DM and NIMs they were primarily CD4+ cells, which is consistent with previous studies. Lastly, glucocorticoid treatment and disease duration have little effect on the MHC-I and MHC-II expression pattern. Our findings indicate that the immunostaining of inflammatory markers such as MHC-I, MHC-II, CD4, CD8, CD303 and MAC are of diagnostic value for IIMs regardless of the immunosuppression regime and disease duration

Drying of the Qaidam basin and its controlling factors deduced from core SG-1

Abstract HKT-ISTP 2013 B

Effect of Subband Landau Level Coupling to the Linearly Dispersing Collective Mode in a Quantum Hall Ferromagnet

In a recent experiment (Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 87}, 036903 (2001)), Spielman et al observed a linearly dispersing collective mode in quantum Hall ferromagnet. While it qualitatively agrees with the Goldstone mode dispersion at small wave vector, the experimental mode velocity is slower than that calculated by previous theories by a factor about 0.55. A better agreement with the experimental data may possibly be achieved by taking the subband Landau level coupling into account due to the finiteness of the layer thickness. A novel coupling of quantum fluctuation to the tunneling is briefly discussed.Comment: 4 pages; published versio

Design of cryogenic 2-14 GHz eleven feed for reflector antennas for future radio telescopes

No Abstract

Steering object-oriented computations with Python

We have described current approaches and future plans for steering C++ application, running Python on parallel platforms, and combination of Tk interface and Python interpreter in steering computations. In addition, there has been significant enhancement in the Gist module. Tk mega widgets has been implemented for a few physics applications. We have also written Python interface to SIJLO, a data storage package used as an interface to a visualization system named MeshTv. Python is being used to control large-scale simulations (molecular dynamics in particular) running on the CM-5 and T3D at LANL as well. A few other code development projects at LLNL are either using or considering Python as their steering shells. In summary, the merits of Python have been appreciated by more and more people in the scientific computation community

Global phase diagram of bilayer quantum Hall ferromagnets

We present a microscopic study of the interlayer spacing d versus in-plane magnetic field $B_\parallel$ phase diagram for bilayer quantum Hall (QH) pseudo-ferromagnets. In addition to the interlayer charge balanced commensurate and incommensurate states analyzed previously, we address the corresponding interlayer charge unbalanced "canted" QH states. We predict a large anomaly in the bilayer capacitance at the canting transition and the formation of dipole stripe domains with periods exceeding 1 micron in the canted state.Comment: 4 RevTeX pgs, 2 eps figures, submitted to PR

Charmonium states in QCD-inspired quark potential model using Gaussian expansion method

We investigate the mass spectrum and electromagnetic processes of charmonium system with the nonperturbative treatment for the spin-dependent potentials, comparing the pure scalar and scalar-vector mixing linear confining potentials. It is revealed that the scalar-vector mixing confinement would be important for reproducing the mass spectrum and decay widths, and therein the vector component is predicted to be around 22%. With the state wave functions obtained via the full-potential Hamiltonian, the long-standing discrepancy in M1 radiative transitions of $J/\psi$ and $\psi^{\prime}$ are alleviated spontaneously. This work also intends to provide an inspection and suggestion for the possible $c\bar{c}$ among the copious higher charmonium-like states. Particularly, the newly observed X(4160) and X(4350) are found in the charmonium family mass spectrum as $M(2^1D_2)= 4164.9$ MeV and $M(3^3P_2)= 4352.4$ MeV, which strongly favor the $J^{PC}=2^{-+}, 2^{++}$ assignments respectively. The corresponding radiative transitions, leptonic and two-photon decay widths have been also predicted theoretically for the further experimental search.Comment: 16 pages,3 figure

Artificial Intelligence in Radiation Therapy

Artificial intelligence (AI) has great potential to transform the clinical workflow of radiotherapy. Since the introduction of deep neural networks, many AI-based methods have been proposed to address challenges in different aspects of radiotherapy. Commercial vendors have started to release AI-based tools that can be readily integrated to the established clinical workflow. To show the recent progress in AI-aided radiotherapy, we have reviewed AI-based studies in five major aspects of radiotherapy including image reconstruction, image registration, image segmentation, image synthesis, and automatic treatment planning. In each section, we summarized and categorized the recently published methods, followed by a discussion of the challenges, concerns, and future development. Given the rapid development of AI-aided radiotherapy, the efficiency and effectiveness of radiotherapy in the future could be substantially improved through intelligent automation of various aspects of radiotherapy