Investigation of a refrigeration system based on combined supercritical CO2 power and transcritical CO2 refrigeration cycles by waste heat recovery of engine

The majority of the energy in the fuel burned in the internal combustion engines is lost in the form of waste heat. To address this issue, waste heat recovery technology has been proposed to increases the overall efficiency of engine. This paper investigates a heat driven cooling system based on a supercritical CO2 (S-CO2) power cycle integrated with a transcritical CO2 (T-CO2) refrigeration cycle, aiming to provide an alternative to the vapour absorption cooling system. The combined system is proposed to produce cooling for food preservation on a refrigerated truck by waste heat recovery of engine. In this system, the S-CO2 absorbs heat from the exhaust gas and the generated power in the expander is used to drive the compressors in both S-CO2 power cycle and T-CO2 refrigeration cycle. Unlike the bulky vapour absorption cooling system, both power plant and vapour compression refrigerator can be scaled down to a few kilo Watts, opening the possibility for developing small-scale waste heat driven cooling system that can be widely applied for waste heat recovery from IC engines of truck, ship and trains.A new layout sharing a common cooler is also studied. The results suggest that the concept of S-CO2/T-CO2 combined cycle sharing a common cooler has comparable performance and it is thermodynamically feasible. The heat contained in exhaust gas is sufficient for the S-CO2/T-CO2 combined system to provide enough cooling for refrigerated truck cabinet whose surface area is more than 105 m2

Resistance Assessment for Oxathiapiprolin in Phytophthora capsici and the Detection of a Point Mutation (G769W) in PcORP1 that Confers Resistance

The potential for oxathiapiprolin resistance in Phytophthora capsici was evaluated. The baseline sensitivities of 175 isolates to oxathiapiprolin were initially determinated and found to conform to a unimodal curve with a mean EC50 value of 5.61×10-4 μg/ml. Twelve stable oxathiapiprolin-resistant mutants were generated by fungicide adaption in two sensitive isolates, LP3 and HNJZ10. The fitness of the LP3-mutants was found to be similar to or better than that of the parental isolate LP3, while the HNJZ10-mutants were found to have lost the capacity to produce zoospores. Taken together these results suggest that the risk of P. capsici developing resistance to oxathiapiprolin is moderate. Comparison of the PcORP1 genes in the LP3-mutants and wild-type parental isolate, which encode the target protein of oxathiapiprolin, revealed that a heterozygous mutation caused the amino acid substitution G769W. Transformation and expression of the mutated PcORP1-769W allele in the sensitive wild-type isolate BYA5 confirmed that the mutation in PcORP1 was responsible for the observed oxathiapiprolin resistance. Finally diagnostic tests including As-PCR and CAPs were developed to detect the oxathiapiprolin resistance resulting from the G769W point mutation in field populations of P. capsici

CAINE: A Context-Aware Information-Centric Network Ecosystem

Information-centric networking (ICN) is an emerging networking paradigm that places content identifiers rather than host identifiers at the core of the mechanisms and protocols used to deliver content to end users. Such a paradigm allows routers enhanced with content-awareness to play a direct role in the routing and resolution of content requests from users, without any knowledge of the specific locations of hosted content. However, to facilitate good network traffic engineering and satisfactory user QoS, content routers need to exchange advanced network knowledge to assist them with their resolution decisions. In order to maintain the location-independency tenet of ICNs, such knowledge (known as context information) needs to be independent of the locations of servers. To this end, we propose CAINE - Context-Aware Information-centric Network Ecosystem - which enables context-based operations to be intrinsically supported by the underlying ICN routing and resolution functions. Our approach has been designed to maintain the location-independence philosophy of ICNs by associating context information directly to content rather than to the physical entities such as servers and network elements in the content ecosystem, while ensuring scalability. Through simulation, we show that based on such location-independent context information, CAINE is able to facilitate traffic engineering in the network, while not posing a significant control signalling burden on the network

Unraveling the diversity of sedimentary sulfate-reducing prokaryotes (SRP) across Tibetan saline lakes using epicPCR

Sulfate reduction is an important biogeochemical process in the ecosphere; however, the major taxa of sulfate reducers have not been fully identified. Here, we used epicPCR (Emulsion, Paired Isolation, and Concatenation PCR) technology to identify the phylogeny of sulfate-reducing prokaryotes (SRP) in sediments from Tibetan Plateau saline lakes. A total of 12,519 OTUs and 883 SRP-OTUs were detected in ten lakes by sequencing of 16S rRNA gene PCR amplicons and epicPCR products of fused 16S rRNA plus dsrB gene, respectively, with Proteobacteria, Firmicutes, and Bacteroidetes being the dominant phyla in both datasets. The 120 highly abundant SRP-OTUs (>1% in at least one sample) were affiliated with 17 described phyla, only 7 of which are widely recognized as SRP phyla. The majority of OTUs from both the whole microbial communities and the SRPs were not detected in more than one specific lake, suggesting high levels of endemism. The -diversity of the entire microbial community and SRP sub-community showed significant positive correlations. The pH value and mean water temperature of the month prior to sampling were the environmental determinants for the whole microbial community, while the mean water temperature and total nitrogen were the major environmental drivers for the SRP sub-community. This study revealed there are still many undocumented SRP in Tibetan saline lakes, many of which could be endemic and adapted to specific environmental conditions.Peer reviewe

Chemical functionalization of graphene oxide for improving mechanical and thermal properties of polyurethane composites

Graphene oxide (GO) was chemically functionalized to manufacture polyurethane (PU) composites with improved mechanical and thermal properties. In order to achieve a well exfoliated and stable GO suspension in organic solvent, 4, 4′- methylenebis(phenyl isocyanate) and polycaprolactone diol – two monomers used to synthesize polyurethane – were employed to functionalize GO sequentially. The obtained functionalized GO (FGO) could form homogeneous dispersions in DMF solvent and the PU matrix, as well as provide a good compatibility with the latter. The most efficient improvement in mechanical properties was achieved when 0.4 wt% FGO was added into the PU matrix, corresponding to increases in the tensile stress, elongation at break and toughness by 34.2%, 27.6% and 64.5%, respectively (compared with those of PU). Regarding the thermal stability, FGO/PU 1 wt% showed the largest enhancement, with T2% and T50% 16 °C and 21 °C higher than those for PU, respectively. A significant improvement in both mechanical properties and thermal stability of FGO/PU composites should be attributed to homogeneous dispersion of FGO in the PU matrix and strong interfacial interaction between them

Liquid biopsy-based single-cell metabolic phenotyping of lung cancer patients for informative diagnostics.

Accurate prediction of chemo- or targeted therapy responses for patients with similar driver oncogenes through a simple and least-invasive assay represents an unmet need in the clinical diagnosis of non-small cell lung cancer. Using a single-cell on-chip metabolic cytometry and fluorescent metabolic probes, we show metabolic phenotyping on the rare disseminated tumor cells in pleural effusions across a panel of 32 lung adenocarcinoma patients. Our results reveal extensive metabolic heterogeneity of tumor cells that differentially engage in glycolysis and mitochondrial oxidation. The cell number ratio of the two metabolic phenotypes is found to be predictive for patient therapy response, physiological performance, and survival. Transcriptome analysis reveals that the glycolytic phenotype is associated with mesenchymal-like cell state with elevated expression of the resistant-leading receptor tyrosine kinase AXL and immune checkpoint ligands. Drug targeting AXL induces a significant cell killing in the glycolytic cells without affecting the cells with active mitochondrial oxidation

Ab initio constrained crystal-chemical Rietveld refinement of Ca10(VxP1-xO4)6F2 apatites

Extraction of reliable bond distances and angles for Ca10(VxP1-xO4)6F2 apatites using standard Rietveld refinement with Cu K(alpha) X-ray powder data was significantly impaired by large imprecision for the O-atom coordinates. An initial attempt to apply crystal-chemical Rietveld refinements to the same compounds was partly successful, and exposed the problematic determination of two oxygen\u8211metal\u8211oxygen angles. Ab initio modeling with VASP in space groups P63/m, P21/m and Pm showed that both these angular parameters exhibited a linear dependence with the vanadium content. Stable crystal-chemical Rietveld refinements in agreement with quantum results were obtained by fixing these angles at the values from ab initio simulations. Residuals were comparable with the less precise standard refinements. The larger vanadium ion is accommodated primarily by uniform expansion and rotation of BO4 tetrahedra combined with a rotation of the Ca\u8211Ca\u8211Ca triangular units. It is proposed that the reduction of symmetry for the vanadium end-member is necessary to avoid considerable departures from formal valences at the AII and B sites in P63/m. The complementarity of quantum methods and structural analysis by powder diffraction in cases with problematic least-squares extraction of the crystal chemistry is discussed.Peer reviewed: YesNRC publication: Ye

Uncooled infrared imaging face recognition using kernel-based feature vector selection

A considerable amount of research has been recently conducted on face recognition tasks, due to increasing demands for security and authentication applications. Recent technological developments in uncooled IR imagery technology have boosted IR face recognition research applications. Our study is part of an on-going research initiated at the Naval Postgraduate School that considers an uncooled low-resolution and low-cost IR camera used for face recognition applications. This work investigates a recent approach which approximates nonlinear kernel-based methods at a significantly reduced computational cost. Our research was applied to an IR database. Results show that this scheme may perform sufficiently close to its â kernelizedâ version considered in a previous study, at a fraction of the computational cost, provided that the associated parameters are well tuned. The thesis considers a relative comparison between the two algorithms, based on identification and verification experiments and considers a statistical test to investigate whether classification performance differences may be considered statistically significant. Results show that, from a cost perspective, a low-resolution uncooled IR camera in conjunction with a low computational-cost classification scheme can be embedded in a robust face recognition system to efficiently address the issue of authentication in security-related tasks

Effect of Pore Geometry on Ultra-Densified Hydrogen in Microporous Carbons

This is the final version. Available on open access from Elsevier via the DOI in this recordOur investigations into molecular hydrogen (H2) confined in microporous carbons with different pore geometries at 77 K have provided detailed information on effects of pore shape on densification of confined H2 at pressures up to 15 MPa. We selected three materials: a disordered, phenolic resin-based activated carbon, a graphitic carbon with slit-shaped pores (titanium carbidederived carbon), and single-walled carbon nanotubes, all with comparable pore sizes of < 1 nm. We show via a combination of in situ inelastic neutron scattering studies, high-pressure H2 adsorption measurements, and molecular modelling that both slit-shaped and cylindrical pores with a diameter of ~0.7 nm lead to significant H2 densification compared to bulk hydrogen under the same conditions, with only subtle differences in hydrogen packing (and hence density) due to geometric constraints. While pore geometry may play some part in influencing the diffusion kinetics and packing arrangement of hydrogen molecules in pores, pore size remains the critical factor determining hydrogen storage capacities. This confirmation of the effects of pore geometry and pore size on the confinement of molecules is essential in understanding and guiding the development and scale-up of porous adsorbents that are tailored for maximising H2 storage capacities, in particular for sustainable energy applications.Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC