Numerical analysis of the slub yarn breaking strength using finite element method

The numerical analysis of the slub yarn breaking strength has been made by using the finite element method (FEM). The slub yarn has been considered as skeletal structures since the yarn longitudinal length is much larger than its horizontal cross-section. Then, the accuracy of the proposed FEM model in calculating the slub yarn breaking strength has been validated by comparing the calculated results with the experimental data. This model can be used to calculate the slub yarn breaking strength normally and provides a theoretical support for product design

Antimicrobial peptide-like genes in Nasonia vitripennis: a genomic perspective

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) are an essential component of innate immunity which can rapidly respond to diverse microbial pathogens. Insects, as a rich source of AMPs, attract great attention of scientists in both understanding of the basic biology of the immune system and searching molecular templates for anti-infective drug design. Despite a large number of AMPs have been identified from different insect species, little information in terms of these peptides is available from parasitic insects.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>By using integrated computational approaches to systemically mining the Hymenopteran parasitic wasp <it>Nasonia vitripennis </it>genome, we establish the first AMP repertoire whose members exhibit extensive sequence and structural diversity and can be distinguished into multiple molecular types, including insect and fungal defensin-like peptides (DLPs) with the cysteine-stabilized α-helical and β-sheet (CSαβ) fold; Pro- or Gly-rich abaecins and hymenoptaecins; horseshoe crab tachystatin-type AMPs with the inhibitor cystine knot (ICK) fold; and a linear α-helical peptide. Inducible expression pattern of seven <it>N. vitripennis </it>AMP genes were verified, and two representative peptides were synthesized and functionally identified to be antibacterial. In comparison with <it>Apis mellifera </it>(Hymenoptera) and several non-Hymenopteran model insects, <it>N. vitripennis </it>has evolved a complex antimicrobial immune system with more genes and larger protein precursors. Three classical strategies that are likely responsible for the complexity increase have been recognized: <it>1</it>) Gene duplication; <it>2</it>) Exon duplication; and <it>3</it>) Exon-shuffling.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The present study established the <it>N. vitripennis </it>peptidome associated with antimicrobial immunity by using a combined computational and experimental strategy. As the first AMP repertoire of a parasitic wasp, our results offer a basic platform for further studying the immunological and evolutionary significances of these newly discovered AMP-like genes in this class of insects.</p

Pedestrian traffic induced lateral vibration including the effect of TMD

This study explores the dynamic behavior of beam induced by bipedal pedestrian traffic and corresponding vibration reducing method by tuned mass damper. Each pedestrian from motion crowd simplifies as a bipedal robot comprised of a lump mass and two massless spring-damping legs. In addition, the tuned mass dampers are installed on the bottom of structure to relieving the vibration of structure. The interactions among pedestrians, tuned mass dampers and structure are considered to establish a governing equation. Research indicates that both the tuned mass damper and pedestrian evidently alter the structural properties of the structure by affecting its frequency and damping capacity. The structure tends to be gently flexible at a lower frequency as pedestrian walk across its surface, but the corresponding damping capacity of the structure is improved. The tuned mass damper always improves both the vibration response and dynamic properties of structure. However, its self-dynamic characteristics of the tuned mass damper tend to deteriorate. The tuned mass damper relieves effectively the lateral vibration in a slender structure than the rigid structure. The change in the mass ratio of tuned mass damper to structure affects significantly the dynamic behaviors of structure. In addition, the layouts of the tuned mass dampers on structure also have remarkable influences on the behaviors. The results of this study provide potential pathways for understanding the vibratory mechanisms of slender structures such as footbridges, grandstands, or stations under crowd excitations

Study on microstructure mechanism of sandstone based on complex network theory

Rock contains a large number of micro-pores, which are of different shapes and complex structures. The structure information of sandstones is extracted based on different porosities through X-ray CT (Computer Tomography) scanning, photo processing techniques and complex network method to explore the topological structure of sandstone seepage network. The results show that sandstone seepage network has scale-free property. The minute quantities of pores with more throat connections have vital functions of overall connectivity of sandstone seepage network, while sandstone seepage network has strong robustness with random error. This research can provide reference for across scales research of porous seepage and multi-disciplinary application of complex network theory

DiffS2UT: A Semantic Preserving Diffusion Model for Textless Direct Speech-to-Speech Translation

While Diffusion Generative Models have achieved great success on image generation tasks, how to efficiently and effectively incorporate them into speech generation especially translation tasks remains a non-trivial problem. Specifically, due to the low information density of speech data, the transformed discrete speech unit sequence is much longer than the corresponding text transcription, posing significant challenges to existing auto-regressive models. Furthermore, it is not optimal to brutally apply discrete diffusion on the speech unit sequence while disregarding the continuous space structure, which will degrade the generation performance significantly. In this paper, we propose a novel diffusion model by applying the diffusion forward process in the \textit{continuous} speech representation space, while employing the diffusion backward process in the \textit{discrete} speech unit space. In this way, we preserve the semantic structure of the continuous speech representation space in the diffusion process and integrate the continuous and discrete diffusion models. We conduct extensive experiments on the textless direct speech-to-speech translation task, where the proposed method achieves comparable results to the computationally intensive auto-regressive baselines (500 steps on average) with significantly fewer decoding steps (50 steps).Comment: Accepted in EMNLP2023 main conferenc