Incorporating salinity considerations in water availability modeling

This research focused on expanding the capabilities of the Water Rights Analysis Package (WRAP) for incorporating salinity considerations in assessments of water availability. A simulation modeling approach was used to address this issue and a generalized simulation model called WRAP-SALT was developed. The Brazos River Basin served as a case study to test the simulation approach adopted by the model. The simulation model adopts a generalized modeling approach applicable to any river basin system. The model tracks salinity throughout a river basin system over different periods of time for alternative scenarios of water use, reservoir system operating policies, and salt control mechanisms. The model was applied to the Brazos River Basin considering different management scenarios and the results obtained were analyzed. Reservoir reliabilities were assessed under user imposed salinity constraints. It was observed that the water supply reliabilities decreased significantly if salinity constraints were considered. Salt control dams proposed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers were also incorporated in the simulation of the river basin. It was observed that salinity in the main stem of the Brazos River was significantly reduced. However, no significant improvement was observed in water supply reliabilities

Enhanced photoelectrochemical response of 1D TiO₂ by atmospheric pressure plasma surface modification

In this paper we demonstrate the use of atmospheric pressure plasma jet (APPJ) to functionalize the surface of hydrothermally synthesized vertically aligned TiO2 nanorods (TNRs) for photo electrochemical (PEC) application. The TNRs functionalized with the atmospheric pressure He-plasma showed relatively higher crystallinity, improved light absorption, and change in the morphology with additional surface area, leading to an enhanced photocurrent density than that of the untreated. Achieving the PEC performance on par with the best in the literature, this APPJ treatment is shown to be a promising technique to obtain better functionality with TNR kind of materials and many other nano-micro systems for various applications such as PEC hydrogen generation

Correlated Noise Provably Beats Independent Noise for Differentially Private Learning

Differentially private learning algorithms inject noise into the learning process. While the most common private learning algorithm, DP-SGD, adds independent Gaussian noise in each iteration, recent work on matrix factorization mechanisms has shown empirically that introducing correlations in the noise can greatly improve their utility. We characterize the asymptotic learning utility for any choice of the correlation function, giving precise analytical bounds for linear regression and as the solution to a convex program for general convex functions. We show, using these bounds, how correlated noise provably improves upon vanilla DP-SGD as a function of problem parameters such as the effective dimension and condition number. Moreover, our analytical expression for the near-optimal correlation function circumvents the cubic complexity of the semi-definite program used to optimize the noise correlation matrix in previous work. We validate our theory with experiments on private deep learning. Our work matches or outperforms prior work while being efficient both in terms of compute and memory.Comment: Christopher A. Choquette-Choo, Krishnamurthy Dvijotham, and Krishna Pillutla contributed equall

Deep-desulfurization of the petroleum diesel using the heterogeneous carboxyl functionalized poly-ionic liquid

Acidic carboxyl functionalized poly(ionic liquid) (CFPIL) has been synthesized and characterized by various techniques like FT-NMR, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR). In this work, deep oxidative desulfurization of model oil (thiophene dissolved in iso-octane) by CFPIL catalyst was carried out in presence of 30 wt% H2O2 solution as an oxidant. The effects of the hydrogen peroxide, amount of CFPIL, temperature-time and recyclability are scrutinized systematically. It was found that the effective molar proportion of H2O2 to sulfur was 4:1 at 70 °C in 180 min with 0.6 g catalyst, removing 100% thiophene from model oil. This method has shown high efficiency for the removal of thiophene, which is difficult to remove from the oil than benzothiophene and dibenzothiophene. Additionally, an oxidative desulfurization mechanism has been proposed according to the experimental results. This catalytic system by CFPIL offers advantages such as higher efficiency, low amount of ionic liquid, simple work up for separating oil from the catalyst and ease of recycling. This protocol inclines to show that diesel fuels in industry can be purified to sulfur-free or ultra-low sulfur fuels by further deep oxidative desulfurization with CFPILs after hydrodesulfurization

Curcumin Stimulates the Antioxidant Mechanisms in Mouse Skin Exposed to Fractionated γ-Irradiation

Fractionated irradiation is one of the important radiotherapy regimens to treat different types of neoplasia. Despite of the immense therapeutic gains accrued by delivering fractionated irradiation to tumors, the radiation burden on skin increases significantly. Low doses of irradiation to skin adversely affect its molecular and metabolic status. The use of antioxidant/s may help to alleviate the radiation-induced changes in the skin and allow delivering a higher dose of radiation to attain better therapeutic gains. Curcumin is an antioxidant and a free radical scavenging dietary supplement, commonly used as a flavoring agent in curries. Therefore, the effect of 100 mg/kg body weight curcumin was studied on the antioxidant status of mice skin exposed to a total dose of 10, 20 and 40 Gy γ-radiation below the rib cage delivered as a single fraction of 2 Gy per day for 5, 10 or 20 days. Skin biopsies from both the curcumin treated or untreated irradiated groups were collected for the biochemical estimations at various post-irradiation times. The irradiation of animals caused a dose dependent decline in the glutathione concentration, glutathione peroxidase, and superoxide dismutase activities and increased the lipid peroxidation in the irradiated skin. Curcumin treatment before irradiation resulted in a significant rise in the glutathione concentration and activities of both the glutathione peroxidase and superoxide dismutase enzymes in mouse skin, whereas lipid peroxidation declined significantly. The present study indicates that curcumin treatment increased the antioxidant status of mouse exposed to different doses of fractionated γ-radiation

Early and Accurate Model of Malignant Lung Nodule Detection System with Less False Positives

ABSTRACT The objective of this work is to identify the malignant lung nodules accurately and early with less false positives. ‘Nodule’ is the 3mm to 30mm diameter size tissue clusters present inside the lung parenchyma region. Segmenting such a small nodules from consecutive CT scan slices are a challenging task. In our work Auto-seed clustering based segmentation technique is used to segment all the possible nodule candidates. Efficient shape and texture features (2D and 3D) were computed to eliminate the false nodule candidates. The change in centroid position of nodule candidates from consecutive slices was used as a measure to remove the vessels. The two-stage classifier is used in this work to classify the malignant and benign nodules. First stage rule-based classifier producing 100 % sensitivity, but with high false positive of 12.5 per patient scan. The BPN based ANN classifier is used as the second-stage classifier which reduces a false positive to 2.26 per patient scan with a reasonable sensitivity of 88.8%. The Rate of Nodule Growth (RNG) was computed in our work to measure the nodules growth between the two scans of the same patient taken at different time interval. Finally, the nodule growth predictive measure was modeled through the features such as compactness (CO), mass deficit (MD), mass excess (ME) and isotropic factor(IF). The developed model results show that the nodules which have low CO, low IF, high MD and high ME values might have the potential to grow in future