389 research outputs found
Microwave-aided synthesis and applications of gold and nickel nanoporous metal forms
"DEC 2013.""A Thesis presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School at the University of Missouri--Columbia In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Science."Thesis supervisor: Dr. Sheila N. Baker.In the field of nanoscience, nanoporous metal foams are a representative type of nanostructured materials, representing the ultimate form factor of a metal. They possess the hybrid properties of metal and nanoarchitectures, including the following properties such as good electrical and thermal conductivity, catalytic activity and high surface area, ultralow density, high strength-to-weight ratio. The outstanding properties bring the nanoporous metal foams to a wide range of applications, especially in the field of sensor system, energy storage and chemical catalyst. A new method of synthesis developed recently is presented for nanoporous metal foams of gold and nickel. The goal of this study is for the synthesis process of NMFs of and some applications in research and realistic life. Gold NMFs were produced by mixing gold chloride with ethylene glycol, ethanol, and reducing agent, and heating at 150 °C for 5 min with a CEM microwave. Both hydrazine and sodium borohydride were applied as the reducing agent for this redox reaction. Nickel NMFs were produced through the similar procedure with a little difference in the heating condition of 50 W, instead of 150 °C, with either hydrazine or sodium borohydride as the reducing agent. Gold NMFs were applied in surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) as a substrate. It is presented that with the presence of gold NMFs, the detection of the rhodamine 6G (R6G), a model analyte, can be enhanced significantly. The limit of detection for rhodamine 6G was found to be 5.2 ₉ 10-7 M in this research. Nickel NMFs was applied to degrade methyl orange (MO). An aqueous MO solution will turn nearly colorless after only 10 h of mixing with 0.025 g of nickel NMFs at room temperature under dark condition. In order to study the kinetics of the degradation reaction, MO solution with different initial concentration were used. This application of Ni NMFs is applicable as waste treatment of industrial water and to protect the environment.Includes bibliographical references (pages 51-54)
Experimental Study on Loading Capacity of Glued-Laminated Timber Arches Subjected to Vertical Concentrated Loads
Empirical Evaluation of the Segment Anything Model (SAM) for Brain Tumor Segmentation
Brain tumor segmentation presents a formidable challenge in the field of
Medical Image Segmentation. While deep-learning models have been useful, human
expert segmentation remains the most accurate method. The recently released
Segment Anything Model (SAM) has opened up the opportunity to apply foundation
models to this difficult task. However, SAM was primarily trained on diverse
natural images. This makes applying SAM to biomedical segmentation, such as
brain tumors with less defined boundaries, challenging. In this paper, we
enhanced SAM's mask decoder using transfer learning with the Decathlon brain
tumor dataset. We developed three methods to encapsulate the four-dimensional
data into three dimensions for SAM. An on-the-fly data augmentation approach
has been used with a combination of rotations and elastic deformations to
increase the size of the training dataset. Two key metrics: the Dice Similarity
Coefficient (DSC) and the Hausdorff Distance 95th Percentile (HD95), have been
applied to assess the performance of our segmentation models. These metrics
provided valuable insights into the quality of the segmentation results. In our
evaluation, we compared this improved model to two benchmarks: the pretrained
SAM and the widely used model, nnUNetv2. We find that the improved SAM shows
considerable improvement over the pretrained SAM, while nnUNetv2 outperformed
the improved SAM in terms of overall segmentation accuracy. Nevertheless, the
improved SAM demonstrated slightly more consistent results than nnUNetv2,
especially on challenging cases that can lead to larger Hausdorff distances. In
the future, more advanced techniques can be applied in order to further improve
the performance of SAM on brain tumor segmentation
Semantics-Empowered Communication: A Tutorial-cum-Survey
Along with the springing up of the semantics-empowered communication (SemCom)
research, it is now witnessing an unprecedentedly growing interest towards a
wide range of aspects (e.g., theories, applications, metrics and
implementations) in both academia and industry. In this work, we primarily aim
to provide a comprehensive survey on both the background and research taxonomy,
as well as a detailed technical tutorial. Specifically, we start by reviewing
the literature and answering the "what" and "why" questions in semantic
transmissions. Afterwards, we present the ecosystems of SemCom, including
history, theories, metrics, datasets and toolkits, on top of which the taxonomy
for research directions is presented. Furthermore, we propose to categorize the
critical enabling techniques by explicit and implicit reasoning-based methods,
and elaborate on how they evolve and contribute to modern content & channel
semantics-empowered communications. Besides reviewing and summarizing the
latest efforts in SemCom, we discuss the relations with other communication
levels (e.g., conventional communications) from a holistic and unified
viewpoint. Subsequently, in order to facilitate future developments and
industrial applications, we also highlight advanced practical techniques for
boosting semantic accuracy, robustness, and large-scale scalability, just to
mention a few. Finally, we discuss the technical challenges that shed light on
future research opportunities.Comment: Submitted to an IEEE journal. Copyright might be transferred without
further notic
Highly Accurate Quantum Chemical Property Prediction with Uni-Mol+
Recent developments in deep learning have made remarkable progress in
speeding up the prediction of quantum chemical (QC) properties by removing the
need for expensive electronic structure calculations like density functional
theory. However, previous methods learned from 1D SMILES sequences or 2D
molecular graphs failed to achieve high accuracy as QC properties primarily
depend on the 3D equilibrium conformations optimized by electronic structure
methods, far different from the sequence-type and graph-type data. In this
paper, we propose a novel approach called Uni-Mol+ to tackle this challenge.
Uni-Mol+ first generates a raw 3D molecule conformation from inexpensive
methods such as RDKit. Then, the raw conformation is iteratively updated to its
target DFT equilibrium conformation using neural networks, and the learned
conformation will be used to predict the QC properties. To effectively learn
this update process towards the equilibrium conformation, we introduce a
two-track Transformer model backbone and train it with the QC property
prediction task. We also design a novel approach to guide the model's training
process. Our extensive benchmarking results demonstrate that the proposed
Uni-Mol+ significantly improves the accuracy of QC property prediction in
various datasets. We have made the code and model publicly available at
\url{https://github.com/dptech-corp/Uni-Mol}
Synthesis of tributyl citrate using SO42-/Zr-MCM-41 as catalyst
Zirconium-containing mesoporous molecular sieve SO42-/Zr-MCM-41 was synthesized for catalyst in synthesis of tributyl citrate. The structure was characterized by XRD, N2 Ad/De isotherms and FT-IR. The results indicated that the solid acids show good catalytic performance and are reusable. Under optimum conditions and using SO42-/Zr-MCM-41 as catalyst, the conversion of citric acid was 95%. After easy separation of the products from the solid acid catalyst, it could be reused three times and gave a conversion of citric acid not less than 92%. The structure of tributyl citrate was characterized by FT-IR and 1H-NMR.KEY WORDS: Mesoporous molecular sieve, Tributyl citrate, Synthesis Bull. Chem. Soc. Ethiop. 2011, 25(1), 147-150
Exploration of the impact of demographic changes on life insurance consumption: empirical analysis based on Shanghai Cooperation Organization
Based on the panel data of eight member states of Shanghai
Cooperation Organization (SCO) from 1996 to 2019, this study
explores the impact of demographic changes on life insurance
consumption in SCO member countries under the framework of
static panel model and dynamic panel model. And the study analyzes
the heterogeneity of religious division and different aging
degrees. The empirical results show that both old-age dependency
ratio and teenager dependency ratio have positive impacts
on life insurance consumption in the SCO countries. Besides, the
current consumption of ordinary life insurance significantly stimulates
the future consumption of ordinary life insurance.
Furthermore, demographic changes have heterogeneous impacts
on life insurance consumption in terms of different religions and
different degrees of aging. Our findings provide managerial implications
for insurance companies that carry out life insurance business
in SCO member states. Insurance companies should consider
the policyholders’ life insurance consumption in accordance with
demographic changes of both old-age dependency ratio and
teenager dependency ratio, and also take differentiated life insurance
sales strategies according to different degrees of aging and
whether the residents believe in Islam
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