Column Flotation of Subbituminous Coal Using the Blend of Trimethyl Pentanediol Derivatives and Pico-Nano Bubbles

Subbituminous coal, a low rank of coal, is difficult-to-float using the conventional flotation process by a single frother such as MIBC and a single collector such as kerosene or fuel oil. The froth flotation of the fine coal separation process is based on the differences of wettability between coal and mineral particles. The formation of oxygenated functional groups on coal surface can reduce its hydrophobicity. This result makes the coal more difficult to float by oily collector alone. Previous work shows that the surfactant can be used to activate the oxygenated surface, by selecting the group of such as fatty acids, trimethyl pentanediol derivatives, hydroxylated ether amine, etc. In the present study, the blend of trimethyl pentanediol derivatives as frother and kerosene as collector are used in column flotation of subbituminous coal. The frother made of trimethyl pentanediol derivatives provides better spreading of oily collector, froth stability, and selectivity. The flotation column used is equipped with a static-mixer and a venturi cavitation tube for pico and nano bubble generation, and a double funnel tailings separator. Three stages of statistical design of experiment of column flotation are conducted to optimize operation conditions. The results show that 96.87% of combustible material recovery and 13.13% of clean coal ash content are obtained. The effect of pico and nano bubbles is to increase the recovery of low rank coal. Furthermore, clean coal with the combustible material recovery of 81.2% and ash content of 9.1%, by desliming minus 45 im size fraction particles of feed coal before column flotation are also achieved

FUNDAMENTAL IMPROVEMENT IN THE TRIBOCHARGING SEPARATION PROCESS FOR UPGRADING COAL

Triboelectrostatic separation is a physical separation technique that is based on surface electronic property differences among minerals to achieve a separation. Minerals have different surface conductivities and electron affinities. They are charged differently in quantity and/or polarity after a tribocharging process. Particles with different surface charges move discretely under external electric field produce a separation. Electrostatic separation is a dry mineral processing method that does not require any water or chemical reagents. It can greatly simplify the processing circuit and reduce operating cost. Additionally, problems caused by water in conventional wet mineral processing such as water freezing, dewatering, water pollution and water treatment are eliminated. Electrostatic separation has great potential as a fine particle separator (i.e. \u3c 1mm) in industrial minerals processing application, especially in arid areas where water supply is limited. In the current study, particle tribocharging kinetics was evaluated using a model system comprised of copper, pure coal, silica and ceramic. The results of the tribocharging process were recorded and analyzed using an oscilloscope and a signal processing technique. Charge exchange, charge separation and charge relaxation corresponding to tribocharging processes were studied using the generated pulsing signals. The signals provided a method to quantify the charge penetration into the conductor bulk during tribocharging. A new method to measure the particle surface charge using the pulsing was proposed and assessed, which was extremely useful for subtle surface charge measurements which effectively eliminated environmental noise. The interactive forces at the contacting interface, relative displacement, material electronic properties and ambient relative humidity were found to impact particle surface charge. The silica surface sites are 69 times more chargeable than the coal surface, which provides a fundamental explanation for upgrading that is achievable for silica-rich coal using triboelectrostatic separation. The influences of operating and environmental parameters were quantified and compared using an environment controlled chamber. Energy consumption at the interface was found to be positively correlated with the particle charge. Relative humidity has dual effects on the particle tribocharging, excessively low or high humidity levels do not favor particle tribocharging. Finally, a semi-empirical mathematical model of particle tribocharging was developed from the basic tribocharging compression model utilizing the parametric experiment study results. The model provides a more accurate method to predict particle surface charge under exact tribocharging conditions. A novel rotary triboelectrostatic separator (RTS) using the tribocharging mechanism was tested for upgrading fine coal. The particle size influencing the RTS tribocharging and separation process is investigated. A practical method to quantify the particle charging distribution was developed based on the direct particle charge measurement and a Gaussian distribution assumption. The smaller particles were found to have a higher average surface charge and wider surface charge distribution, which provided an opportunity to separate the high grade and the low grade coal particles. However, particles that are too small have weak particle-charger tribocharging effect that reduces particle tribocharging efficiency. The particle separation process was analyzed considering the exact experimental hydrodynamic separating conditions. Smaller particles were found to be more sensitive to the airflow that used to transport the particles as a result of the effect on residence time in the separation chamber. A method combining mathematical and statistical analysis was proposed to theoretically predict RTS separation efficiency based on the particle charging conditions and particle separation conditions. The particle horizontal displacement probability distribution was ultimately derived from this method. The model predictions indicate that a wider horizontal displacement distribution provides improved separation efficiency for the RTS unit. The theoretical analysis indicates that a particle size range between 0.105 and 0.21 mm has widest horizontal displacement distribution and thus represents an optimum particle size range which is in agreement with experimental results. The influences of the RTS operating parameters on separation performance achieved on a pure coal-silica mixture were investigated using a parametric study. The optimum operating conditions were identified. Using the optimum conditions, a five-stage separation process was conducted using the RTS unit to obtain the necessary data for the development of an ideal performance curve. Two stages of RTS separation were found to generate good quality clean coal with acceptable recovery. Particle tribocharging tests were performed using pure coal, pure silica and the coal-silica mixture as model feed materials. The test result found that mixing the pure coal with the sand reduced the particle charge distribution of the coal while increasing the charge distribution of the pure silica particle. The finding explains the inability to produce clean coal products containing ultra-low ash contents. However, the rejection of silica to the tailings stream is very high. The RTS upgrading of low-ash coal sample was tried using experiment design method, which revealed that feed rate was the most significant while the applied charger voltage and the injection air rate were the least significant in regards to product quality. Feed mass flow rate and the co-flow air rate have a significant interactive effect. Considering the theoretical findings, the impact of high feed rates is due to the negative effect on particle tribocharging efficiency resulting from an increase in the particle-particle surface charge relaxation. Under the optimum test conditions, an ultraclean coal was produced with an ash content of 3.85±0.08% with a combustible recovery of 62.97±1.11% using the RTS unit

Dynamic analysis of offset press gear-cylinder-bearing system applying finite element method

A dynamic model of offset press gear transmission system made up of gears, cylinders and bearings is proposed in this study. The model based on finite element method (FEM) includes some nonlinearity such as time-varying meshing stiffness, backlash, static transmission error and contact nonlinearity, which lead to complex nonlinear coupling. The Darren Bell principle and Lagrangian approach are applied to derive the motion equations of system, then the Newmark method is used to solve the equations for meshing force, acceleration, shoulder iron and rubber contact force. Eigenvalue solution is used to predict the critical speed, moreover, the influence of the radial and axial stiffness on the first-order critical speed is discussed. Considering the importance of acceleration and meshing force, the RMS value of acceleration and dynamic factor are also studied in this paper. The dynamic orbits of system are observed from the phase diagram, power spectrum, Lyapunov exponent and Poincare map. The figures clearly indicate that there are various forms of periodic and chaotic motions in different conditions. The simulation results show that with the increase of rotating speed, dynamic orbits transfer from periodic motion to chaotic motion in the cylinder discrete state

Characterization of Staphylococcus aureus ST3320 clone causing fatal respiratory infection in rabbits

[EN] Staphylococcus aureus is a well-known pathogen that infects humans and animals. However, information on the fatal respiratory infection in rabbits caused by S. aureus is still limited. In the present study, a S. aureus isolate designated ND01 was recovered from lung samples of rabbits that died of fatal respiratory infection, and the ND01 was characterised by intranasal infection of rabbits, multi-locus sequencing typing, screening virulence genes and testing antimicrobial susceptibility. Clinical signs of matted forepaws and pathological lesions of haemorrhagic tracheitis and necrotising haemorrhagic pneumonia were observed in the ND01 infected rabbits, which were identical to those of naturally infected ones. The sequence type of the ND01 was defined as ST3320 and the ND01 was further grouped into the clonal complex 398. Notably, the ND01 was pvl-positive S. aureus and carried the human-associated scn gene. Moreover, the ND01 was methicillin-susceptible S. aureus and was susceptible to 6 of 10 tested antibiotics. This study described the characteristics of the ND01 causing fatal respiratory infection in rabbits. The results are helpful to further the understanding of the pathogenicity of S. aureus ST3320 clone in rabbits. The results also highlighted that operators must be on the alert for the colonisation of pvl-positive S. aureus in rabbits and potential transmission events between rabbits and humans.This work was supported by the Fujian Natural Science Foundation (2020J01346), Fujian Public Welfare Project (2019R1026-9) and National Rabbit Industry Technology System of People’s Republic of China (CARS-43-G-5).Wang, J.; Sun, S.; Chen, Y.; Chen, D.; Sang, L.; Xie, X. (2021). Characterization of Staphylococcus aureus ST3320 clone causing fatal respiratory infection in rabbits. 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Neutron Energy Spectrum Measurements with a Compact Liquid Scintillation Detector on EAST

A neutron detector based on EJ301 liquid scintillator has been employed at EAST to measure the neutron energy spectrum for D-D fusion plasma. The detector was carefully characterized in different quasi-monoenergetic neutron fields generated by a 4.5 MV Van de Graaff accelerator. In recent experimental campaigns, due to the low neutron yield at EAST, a new shielding device was designed and located as close as possible to the tokamak to enhance the count rate of the spectrometer. The fluence of neutrons and gamma-rays was measured with the liquid neutron spectrometer and was consistent with 3He proportional counter and NaI (Tl) gamma-ray spectrometer measurements. Plasma ion temperature values were deduced from the neutron spectrum in discharges with lower hybrid wave injection and ion cyclotron resonance heating. Scattered neutron spectra were simulated by the Monte Carlo transport Code, and they were well verified by the pulse height measurements at low energies.Comment: 19 pages,10 figures, 1 tabl

Annotation-free Audio-Visual Segmentation

The objective of Audio-Visual Segmentation (AVS) is to locate sounding objects within visual scenes by accurately predicting pixelwise segmentation masks. In this paper, we present the following contributions: (i), we propose a scalable and annotation-free pipeline for generating artificial data for the AVS task. We leverage existing image segmentation and audio datasets to draw links between category labels, image-mask pairs, and audio samples, which allows us to easily compose (image, audio, mask) triplets for training AVS models; (ii), we introduce a novel Audio-Aware Transformer (AuTR) architecture that features an audio-aware query-based transformer decoder. This architecture enables the model to search for sounding objects with the guidance of audio signals, resulting in more accurate segmentation; (iii), we present extensive experiments conducted on both synthetic and real datasets, which demonstrate the effectiveness of training AVS models with synthetic data generated by our proposed pipeline. Additionally, our proposed AuTR architecture exhibits superior performance and strong generalization ability on public benchmarks. The project page is https://jinxiang-liu.github.io/anno-free-AVS/.Comment: Under Revie

Audio-aware Query-enhanced Transformer for Audio-Visual Segmentation

The goal of the audio-visual segmentation (AVS) task is to segment the sounding objects in the video frames using audio cues. However, current fusion-based methods have the performance limitations due to the small receptive field of convolution and inadequate fusion of audio-visual features. To overcome these issues, we propose a novel \textbf{Au}dio-aware query-enhanced \textbf{TR}ansformer (AuTR) to tackle the task. Unlike existing methods, our approach introduces a multimodal transformer architecture that enables deep fusion and aggregation of audio-visual features. Furthermore, we devise an audio-aware query-enhanced transformer decoder that explicitly helps the model focus on the segmentation of the pinpointed sounding objects based on audio signals, while disregarding silent yet salient objects. Experimental results show that our method outperforms previous methods and demonstrates better generalization ability in multi-sound and open-set scenarios.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2305.1101

A New Globally Exponential Stability Criterion for Neural Networks with Discrete and Distributed Delays

This paper concerns the problem of the globally exponential stability of neural networks with discrete and distributed delays. A novel criterion for the globally exponential stability of neural networks is derived by employing the Lyapunov stability theory, homomorphic mapping theory, and matrix theory. The proposed result improves the previously reported global stability results. Finally, two illustrative numerical examples are given to show the effectiveness of our results