Development of guidelines for designers and operators of grinding mills aimed at improving the service life of drivetrain components.

Grinding mills are used extensively in the mining, cement and minerals processing industries. Numerous failures of drivetrain components of grinding mills have occurred in recent years. The components are not meeting their required design lives leaving mill owners concerned about the expensive repair costs and lost profits associated with the mill downtime during repairs. There is a need to research the design methodology of the drivetrain components of grinding mills and the analysis of fatigue failures in mills and similar equipment e.g. kilns in order to develop a comprehensive and improved picture of how to design and operate these mills. As with numerous other engineered items, the critical issue is that a thorough understanding of the type, magnitude, direction, and duration of all loads that the components will experience while in operation is required in order to design them correctly. A literature survey was performed to research advanced design methods and identify sources of loading data for grinding mills. Many interesting references were identified but no specific examples were found where strain gauge measurements were used to quantify the loads experienced by the drivetrain components of grinding mills. Strain gauge measurements were conducted on the drivetrains of 30 grinding mills. The measured data was processed and analysed to determine the key operating loads experienced by the grinding mill drivetrain components. These loads were used in a review of the engineering design calculations for these components and the important findings are highlighted. Finally, comprehensive fatigue analysis was conducted using the measured data to understand the major contributors to poor service life of the drivetrain components. Based on the findings of the investigation, several conclusions and recommendations are made that can serve as useful guidelines for improving the service life of grinding mills for both designers and operators of these machines

Opinions of the consultants and certification houses regarding the quality factors and achieved effects of the introduced quality system

U kreativnoj primjeni sustava kvalitete i ostvarenim učincima u organizacijama, veoma je važno sagledati ovo pitanje iz nekoliko kutova. Najčešći način promatranja je sa strane organizacije, ali ne smijemo zaboraviti ni one koji su sudjelovali u cjelokupnom procesu uvođenja i certificiranja sustava kvalitete u organizacijama. To su u prvom redu konzultanti i certifikacijske kuće. Osim njih, mogući kutovi promatranja su također i sa strane kupaca i dobavljača. U radu su prikazani rezultati o mišljenju konzultanata sustava kvalitete i certifikacijskih kuća o ostvarenim učincima, u organizacijama s uvedenim sustavom kvalitete, u Bosni i Hercegovini. Istraživanje je provedeno na 31 konzultantu i 11 certifikacijskih kuća gdje su prvo istraživana mišljenja konzultanata i certifikacijskih kuća o faktorima koji utječu na kvalitetu, a zatim su istraživana njihova mišljenja o ostvarenom učinku na 14 ponuđenih faktora (učinaka). Uvedeni sustav kvalitete u organizacijama u Bosni i Hercegovini, prema mišljenju konzultanata i certifikacijskih kuća, utjecao je na većinu razmatranih faktora, osim faktora koji se odnose na zaposlene i povećanje inovacija.In the creative application of quality system and achieved effects in organizations, it is very important to consider this issue from several angles. The most common way of viewing it is from the point of view of the organization, but we must not forget those who have participated in the overall process of introduction and certification of quality systems in organizations. These are primarily the consultants and certification houses. Besides them, the possible angles of observation are also coming from the point of view of customers and suppliers. This work presents the results on opinions of the consultants of quality system and certification houses about achieved effects in organizations with introduced quality system, in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The research was conducted on 31 consultants and 11 certification houses, where the opinions of consultants and certification houses about factors affecting the quality were studied firstly, and then followed by the opinions of consultants about achieved effect in 14 offered factors (effects). According to the opinions of consultants and certification houses, the introduced quality system in organizations in Bosnia and Herzegovina affected most of observed factors, except for the factors relating to the employees and increment of innovations

Multimodal news analytics using measures of cross-modal entity and context consistency

The World Wide Web has become a popular source to gather information and news. Multimodal information, e.g., supplement text with photographs, is typically used to convey the news more effectively or to attract attention. The photographs can be decorative, depict additional details, but might also contain misleading information. The quantification of the cross-modal consistency of entity representations can assist human assessors’ evaluation of the overall multimodal message. In some cases such measures might give hints to detect fake news, which is an increasingly important topic in today’s society. In this paper, we present a multimodal approach to quantify the entity coherence between image and text in real-world news. Named entity linking is applied to extract persons, locations, and events from news texts. Several measures are suggested to calculate the cross-modal similarity of the entities in text and photograph by exploiting state-of-the-art computer vision approaches. In contrast to previous work, our system automatically acquires example data from the Web and is applicable to real-world news. Moreover, an approach that quantifies contextual image-text relations is introduced. The feasibility is demonstrated on two datasets that cover different languages, topics, and domains

Multimodal news analytics using measures of cross-modal entity and context consistency

The World Wide Web has become a popular source to gather information and news. Multimodal information, e.g., supplement text with photographs, is typically used to convey the news more effectively or to attract attention. The photographs can be decorative, depict additional details, but might also contain misleading information. The quantification of the cross-modal consistency of entity representations can assist human assessors’ evaluation of the overall multimodal message. In some cases such measures might give hints to detect fake news, which is an increasingly important topic in today’s society. In this paper, we present a multimodal approach to quantify the entity coherence between image and text in real-world news. Named entity linking is applied to extract persons, locations, and events from news texts. Several measures are suggested to calculate the cross-modal similarity of the entities in text and photograph by exploiting state-of-the-art computer vision approaches. In contrast to previous work, our system automatically acquires example data from the Web and is applicable to real-world news. Moreover, an approach that quantifies contextual image-text relations is introduced. The feasibility is demonstrated on two datasets that cover different languages, topics, and domains. © 2021, The Author(s)

Comparative simulation study of production scheduling in the hybrid and the parallel flow

Scheduling is one of the most important decisions in production control. An approach is proposed for supporting users to solve scheduling problems, by choosing the combination of physical manufacturing system configuration and the material handling system settings. The approach considers two alternative manufacturing scheduling configurations in a two stage product oriented manufacturing system, exploring the hybrid flow shop (HFS) and the parallel flow shop (PFS) environments. For illustrating the application of the proposed approach an industrial case from the automotive components industry is studied. The main aim of this research to compare results of study of production scheduling in the hybrid and the parallel flow, taking into account the makespan minimization criterion. Thus the HFS and the PFS performance is compared and analyzed, mainly in terms of the makespan, as the transportation times vary. The study shows that the performance HFS is clearly better when the work stations' processing times are unbalanced, either in nature or as a consequence of the addition of transport times just to one of the work station processing time but loses advantage, becoming worse than the performance of the PFS configuration when the work stations' processing times are balanced, either in nature or as a consequence of the addition of transport times added on the work stations' processing times. This means that physical layout configurations along with the way transport time are including the work stations' processing times should be carefully taken into consideration due to its influence on the performance reached by both HFS and PFS configurations.This work was supported by National Funds through FCT "Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia" under the program: PEst2015-2020, ref. UID/CEC/00319/2013.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Evaluating Fatty Acid Amide Hydrolase as a Suitable Target for Sleep Promotion in a Transgenic TauP301S Mouse Model of Neurodegeneration

Sleep disruption is an expected component of aging and neurodegenerative conditions, including Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Sleep disruption has been demonstrated as a driver of AD pathology and cognitive decline. Therefore, treatments designed to maintain sleep may be effective in slowing or halting AD progression. However, commonly used sleep aid medications are associated with an increased risk of AD, highlighting the need for sleep aids with novel mechanisms of action. The endocannabinoid system holds promise as a potentially effective and novel sleep-enhancing target. By using pharmacology and genetic knockout strategies, we evaluated fatty acid amide hydrolase (FAAH) as a therapeutic target to improve sleep and halt disease progression in a transgenic Tau P301S (PS19) model of Tauopathy and AD. We have recently shown that PS19 mice exhibit sleep disruption in the form of dark phase hyperarousal as an early symptom that precedes robust Tau pathology and cognitive decline. Acute FAAH inhibition with PF3845 resulted in immediate improvements in sleep behaviors in male and female PS19 mice, supporting FAAH as a potentially suitable sleep-promoting target. Moreover, sustained drug dosing for 5–10 days resulted in maintained improvements in sleep. To evaluate the effect of chronic FAAH inhibition as a possible therapeutic strategy, we generated FAAH−/− PS19 mice models. Counter to our expectations, FAAH knockout did not protect PS19 mice from progressive sleep loss, neuroinflammation, or cognitive decline. Our results provide support for FAAH as a novel target for sleep-promoting therapies but further indicate that the complete loss of FAAH activity may be detrimental

Regulation of mTORC1 Signaling by pH

BACKGROUND: Acidification of the cytoplasm and the extracellular environment is associated with many physiological and pathological conditions, such as intense exercise, hypoxia and tumourigenesis. Acidification affects important cellular functions including protein synthesis, growth, and proliferation. Many of these vital functions are controlled by mTORC1, a master regulator protein kinase that is activated by various growth-stimulating signals and inactivated by starvation conditions. Whether mTORC1 can also respond to changes in extracellular or cytoplasmic pH and play a role in limiting anabolic processes in acidic conditions is not known. METHODOLOGY/FINDINGS: We examined the effects of acidifying the extracellular medium from pH 7.4 to 6.4 on human breast carcinoma MCF-7 cells and immortalized mouse embryo fibroblasts. Decreasing the extracellular pH caused intracellular acidification and rapid, graded and reversible inhibition of mTORC1, assessed by measuring the phosphorylation of the mTORC1 substrate S6K. Fibroblasts deleted of the tuberous sclerosis complex TSC2 gene, a major negative regulator of mTORC1, were unable to inhibit mTORC1 in acidic extracellular conditions, showing that the TSC1-TSC2 complex is required for this response. Examination of the major upstream pathways converging on the TSC1-TSC2 complex showed that Akt signaling was unaffected by pH but that the Raf/MEK/ERK pathway was inhibited. Inhibition of MEK with drugs caused only modest mTORC1 inhibition, implying that other unidentified pathways also play major roles. CONCLUSIONS: This study reveals a novel role for the TSC1/TSC2 complex and mTORC1 in sensing variations in ambient pH. As a common feature of low tissue perfusion, low glucose availability and high energy expenditure, acidic pH may serve as a signal for mTORC1 to downregulate energy-consuming anabolic processes such as protein synthesis as an adaptive response to metabolically stressful conditions