Flavonoids and Pectins

Pectins and flavonoids are two related groups of important secondary metabolites derived from plants. The interaction between pectins and flavonoids can affect their shelf-life stability, functionality, bioavailability, and bioaccessibility. In this chapter, we will concentrate on the current opinions on the flavonoids to understand how to classify this group of secondary metabolites, what biological and pharmacological activities they possess, and how to biosynthesize them in plants. We will then discuss the general strategies for the derivation of these small secondary compounds. The strategies comprise traditional plant extraction, chemical synthesis, and biosynthesis. We will also discuss the advantages and disadvantages of these three production strategies in the derivation of flavonoids and the future research directions in generating health-beneficial flavonoids using the biosynthetic strategy

Existence and stability of periodic solutions for a delayed prey–predator model with diffusion effects

Existence and stability of spatially periodic solutions for a delay prey-predator diffusion system are concerned in this work. We obtain that the system can generate the spatially nonhomogeneous periodic solutions when the diffusive rates are suitably small. This result demonstrates that the diffusion plays an important role on deriving the complex spatiotemporal dynamics. Meanwhile, the stability of the spatially periodic solutions is also studied. Finally, in order to verify our theoretical results, some numerical simulations are also included

Physics-Transfer Learning for Material Strength Screening

The strength of materials, like many problems in the natural sciences, spans multiple length and time scales, and the solution has to balance accuracy and performance. Peierls stress is one of the central concepts in crystal plasticity that measures the strength through the resistance of a dislocation to plastic flow. The determination of Peierls stress involves a multiscale nature depending on both elastic lattice responses and the energy landscape of crystal slips. Material screening by strength via the Peierls stress from first-principles calculations is computationally intractable for the nonlocal characteristics of dislocations, and not included in the state-of-the-art computational material databases. In this work, we propose a physics-transfer framework to learn the physics of crystal plasticity from empirical atomistic simulations and then predict the Peierls stress from chemically accurate density functional theory-based calculations of material parameters. Notably, the strengths of single-crystalline metals can be predicted from a few single-point calculations for the deformed lattice and on the {\gamma} surface, allowing efficient, high-throughput screening for material discovery. Uncertainty quantification is carried out to assess the accuracy of models and sources of errors, showing reduced physical and system uncertainties in the predictions by elevating the fidelity of training models. This physics-transfer framework can be generalized to other problems facing the accuracy-performance dilemma, by harnessing the hierarchy of physics in the multiscale models of materials science

Numerical Analysis Methods of Structural Fatigue and Fracture Problems

Fatigue and fracture problems, which lead to 95% of structural failure, have attracted much attention of engineers and researchers all over the world. Compared with experimental method, numerical simulation method based on empirical models shows its remarkable advantages in structure design because of less cost and higher efficiency. However, the application of numerical simulation method in fatigue lifetime prediction is restricted by low accuracy and poor applicability in some circumstances. Most numerical method is based on empirical models. This chapter first reviews various kinds of empirical models of fatigue and fracture problems, including some modifying methods of basic empirical models, which have been widely applied to fatigue lifetime prediction and indicated their advantages and disadvantages. Then, FEM is introduced as an important method to obtain stress intensity factor or crack growth route. At last, this chapter is finished with existing problems and current trends in fatigue lifetime prediction via numerical method