Mirror nuclei constraint in mass formula

The macroscopic-microscopic mass formula is further improved by considering mirror nuclei constraint. The rms deviation with respect to 2149 measured nuclear masses is reduced to 0.441 MeV. The shell corrections, the deformations of nuclei, the neutron and proton drip lines, and the shell gaps are also investigated to test the model. The rms deviation of alpha-decay energies of 46 super-heavy nuclei is reduced to 0.263 MeV. The central position of the super-heavy island could lie around N=176~178 and Z=116~120 according to the shell corrections of nuclei.Comment: 15 pages, 7 figures, 3 tables; version to appear in Phys. Rev.

Health Monitoring for Coated Steel Belts in an Elevator System

This paper presents a method of health monitoring for coated steel belts in an elevator system by measuring the electrical resistance of the ropes embedded in the belt. A model on resistance change caused by fretting wear and stress fatigue has been established. Temperature and reciprocating cycles are also taken into consideration when determining the potential strength degradation of the belts. It is proved by experiments that the method could effectively estimate the health degradation of the most dangerous section as well as other ones along the whole belts

Phylogeny and taxonomy on cryptic species of forked ferns of asia

Cryptic species comprise two or more taxa that are grounded under a single name because they are more-or-less indistinguishable morphologically. These species are potentially important for detailed assessments of biodiversity, but there now appear to be many more cryptic species than previously estimated. One taxonomic group likely to contain many cryptic species is Dicranopteris, a genus of forked ferns that occurs commonly along roadsides in Asia. The genus has a complex taxonomical history, and D. linearis has been particularly challenging with many intra-specific taxa dubiously erected to accommodate morphological variation that lacks clear discontinuities. To resolve species boundaries within Dicranopteris, we applied a molecular phylogenetic approach as complementary to morphology. Specifically, we used five chloroplast gene regions (rbcL, atpB, rps4, matK, and trnL-trnF) to generate a well-resolved phylogeny based on 37 samples representing 13 taxa of Dicranopteris, spanning the major distributional area in Asia. The results showed that Dicranopteris consists of ten highly supported clades, and D. linearis is polyphyletic, suggesting cryptic diversity within the species. Further through morphological comparison, we certainly erected Dicranopteris austrosinensis Y.H. Yan & Z.Y. Wei sp. nov. and Dicranopteris baliensis Y.H. Yan & Z.Y. Wei sp. nov. as distinct species and proposed five new combinations. We also inferred that the extant diversity of the genus Dicranopteris may result from relatively recent diversification in the Miocene based on divergence time dating. Overall, our study not only provided additional insights on the Gleicheniaceae tree of life, but also served as a case of integrating molecular and morphological approaches to elucidate cryptic diversity in taxonomically difficult groups

On-line optimization of glutamate production based on balanced metabolic control by RQ

In glutamate fermentations by Corynebacterium glutamicum, higher glutamate concentration could be achieved by constantly controlling dissolved oxygen concentration (DO) at a lower level; however, by-product lactate also severely accumulated. The results of analyzing activities changes of the two key enzymes, glutamate and lactate dehydrogenases involved with the fermentation, and the entire metabolic network flux analysis showed that the lactate overproduction was because the metabolic flux in TCA cycle was too low to balance the glucose glycolysis rate. As a result, the respiratory quotient (RQ) adaptive control based “balanced metabolic control” (BMC) strategy was proposed and used to regulate the TCA metabolic flux rate at an appropriate level to achieve the metabolic balance among glycolysis, glutamate synthesis, and TCA metabolic flux. Compared with the best results of various DO constant controls, the BMC strategy increased the maximal glutamate concentration by about 15% and almost completely repressed the lactate accumulation with competitively high glutamate productivity

Virtually fixed channel assignment in cellular mobile telephone systems: Design, modeling and evaluation.

The frequency spectrum allocated to cellular mobile telephone systems is very limited. Efficient channel assignment schemes can significantly increase the utilization of the available frequency channels. Virtually Fixed Channel Assignment (VFCA) is a dynamic channel assignment method. The idea behind it is simple: each cell is allocated a set of nominal channels. A call request generated in a cell is assigned a nominal channel if one is available. Otherwise, a channel from an adjacent cell is borrowed to serve this call as long as frequency interference constraints are satisfied. VFCA is a promising method because (i) it is efficient in channel assignment, and (ii) it is relatively easy to implement compared to other dynamic channel assignment methods. VFCA has been analyzed based primarily on simulation studies in the past twenty years. In this thesis, we focus our study on development of new channel borrowing strategies and analytical models for VFCA. The contribution of this work is summarized as follows. (1) Development of an queuing model for performance analysis of VFCA. This model may also be used to conduct sensitivity analysis on some system parameters when VFCA is used. (2) Proposed a new channel reservation scheme for handoffs. (In a cellular system, when a call using a channel crosses a cell boundary, it needs to be handed off to a new channel in the new cell. This is called a handoff.) An optimization model for this channel reservation scheme is developed. (3) Applied the fluid-flow approach to modeling an integrated mobile cellular system that uses VFCA to estimate the distribution of data queue length in a cell of the system. These results are useful in the design, performance analysis and optimization of VFCA schemes

Predicting Service Metrics from Device Statistics in a Container-Based Environment

Service assurance is critical for high-demand services running on telecom clouds. While service performance metrics may not always be available in real time to telecom operators or service providers, service performance prediction becomes an important building block for such a system. However, it is generally hard to achieve.  In this master thesis, we propose a machine-learning based method that enables performance prediction for services running in virtualized environments with Docker containers. This method is service agnostic and the prediction models built by this method use only device statistics collected from the server machine and from the containers hosted on it to predict the values of the service-level metrics experienced on the client side.  The evaluation results from the testbed, which runs a Video-on-Demand service using containerized servers, show that such a method can accurately predict different service-level metrics under various scenarios and, by applying suitable preprocessing techniques, the performance of the prediction models can be further improved.  In this thesis, we also show the design of a proof-of-concept of a Real-Time Analytics Engine that uses online learning methods to predict the service-level metrics in real time in a container-based environment