9,839 research outputs found
Financial Crisis and the Resolution of Financial Distress: Evidence from Malaysia and Thailand
Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH
Polycrystalline Perovskite Ferroelectrics: Microstructural Origins of the Macroscale Electromechanical Response
Ferroelectrics are a class of electromechanically coupled materials which possess an electric dipole polarization that can be permanently reoriented by applied electric and mechanical stress fields. Their reorientable polarization results in complex, nano- to micrometer scale domain structures whose evolution under electric and mechanical stress fields alters the material's overall time-dependent electrical and viscoelastic properties. To understand domain structure evolution, in-situ microscopy of domain switching processes in ferroelectric thin films, single crystals and nanoparticles have been well-studied in the past. However, domain evolution in bulk polycrystals is less well understood as their local stress and electric field environment differs from thin specimens.
This work seeks to understand ferroelectric domain evolution in bulk ferroelectric perovskite polycrystals using a combination of a recently-developed electromechanical characterization technique, Broadband Electromechanical Spectroscopy (BES), and theoretical-computational predictions. A constitutive material model for polycrystalline ferroelectrics is first developed and applied to simulate barium titanate single crystals and polycrystals. Simulated polarization, strain and energy dissipation hysteresis curves show good qualitative agreement to experimental data and demonstrate that macroscale properties can be efficiently predicted from microscale physics to some extent.
The microstructural origins of fatigue behavior in bulk polycrystalline lead zirconate titanate (PZT) are investigated using a combination of macroscale electrical and viscoelastic property characterization via BES, and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) imaging of microstructure. The evolution of electrical and viscoelastic properties during bipolar electrical fatigue show differences in the effects of electrical vs. mechanical fatigue processes, and the latter is verified through SEM imaging and measurement of microcracks.
Finally, the same electromechanical BES characterizations are performed on specimens of bulk polycrystalline barium titanate (BT). Results reveal stark qualitative differences in electrical and viscoelastic responses from PZT despite both materials being perovskite ferroelectrics. A growth vs. nucleation hypothesis is proposed to explain the observed results, guided by preliminary imaging of domain microstructure.
In summary, the BES is a powerful tool to elucidate domain switching processes within bulk ferroelectric specimens, while a computational method which bridges the micro- and macroscale further adds to the diagnostic toolbox of understanding bulk ferroelectric domain switching mechanisms. This opens the pathway to designing future applications which make use of the unique electrical and viscoelastic properties of ferroelectric switching.</p
Cellular apoptosis induced by replication of hepatitis B virus: possible link between viral genotype and clinical outcome
HBV remains one of the major pathogens of liver diseases but the outcomes as inflammation, cirrhosis and cancer of the liver are greatly related to different viral genotypes. The aim of this study was to assess the pro-apoptotic effect of HBSP from three HBV genotypes on liver derived cells. HepG2 cells were applied in our system and transfected by HBV genotype A, B, and C. Cells were observed under phase contrast microscope, stained by apoptosis marker and analyzed by flow cytometre. HBSP expression was detected by western blot assay. BH3 sequences were aligned and analyzed by Vector NTI. HBV genotypes A, B, and C transfected cells displayed evidence of cell death which was further proved as apoptosis. Natural expression of a pro-apoptotic protein HBSP was detected during genomes transfection. The different apoptotic effects were correlated to the HBSP expression from each genome. Alignment and analysis of the BH3 domains from the three genomes revealed slight variance which might also contribute to the result. Our results suggested that variant HBSP expression and BH3 sequence of HBV genotypes may be involved in differential apoptotic effect in transfected cells. Detailed analysis of the role of HBV genotypes in cellular apoptotic process should provide molecular information on the reported clinical outcome of infection by different HBV genotypes
Polytypism and Unexpected Strong Interlayer Coupling of two-Dimensional Layered ReS2
The anisotropic two-dimensional (2D) van der Waals (vdW) layered materials,
with both scientific interest and potential application, have one more
dimension to tune the properties than the isotropic 2D materials. The
interlayer vdW coupling determines the properties of 2D multi-layer materials
by varying stacking orders. As an important representative anisotropic 2D
materials, multilayer rhenium disulfide (ReS2) was expected to be random
stacking and lack of interlayer coupling. Here, we demonstrate two stable
stacking orders (aa and a-b) of N layer (NL, N>1) ReS2 from ultralow-frequency
and high-frequency Raman spectroscopy, photoluminescence spectroscopy and
first-principles density functional theory calculation. Two interlayer shear
modes are observed in aa-stacked NL-ReS2 while only one interlayer shear mode
appears in a-b-stacked NL-ReS2, suggesting anisotropic-like and isotropic-like
stacking orders in aa- and a-b-stacked NL-ReS2, respectively. The frequency of
the interlayer shear and breathing modes reveals unexpected strong interlayer
coupling in aa- and a-b-NL-ReS2, the force constants of which are 55-90% to
those of multilayer MoS2. The observation of strong interlayer coupling and
polytypism in multi-layer ReS2 stimulate future studies on the structure,
electronic and optical properties of other 2D anisotropic materials
Kenaf (Hibiscus cannabinus L.) seed oil-in-water Pickering nanoemulsions stabilised by mixture of sodium caseinate, Tween 20 and β-cyclodextrin
The limit application of functional kenaf (Hibiscus cannabinus L.) seed oil in food and pharmaceutical industry owing to the poor water solubility and low storage stability can be overcome by the development of kenaf seed oil-in-water Pickering nanoemulsions. In this study, oil-in-water Pickering nanoemulsions were produced to investigate its stability by optimising emulsifier mixtures, namely sodium caseinate (SC), Tween 20 (T20) and β-cyclodextrin (β-CD). The interaction effects of SC and T20 on the formation of Pickering nanoemulsions with β-CD was studied and found synergistic effect among them that enhanced the stability of Pickering nanoemulsions. The optimum proportion of emulsifier mixtures obtained by employing simplex centroid mixture design was found to be 57.9% (w/w) SC, 27.6% (w/w) T20, and 14.5% (w/w) β-CD, which produced Pickering nanoemulsion with mean particle size of 155.53 nm, PDI of 0.07 and zeta-potential of −46.67 mV. These experimental values were in accordance with the predicted value, indicating the adequacy of the fitted models. The mixture design was found to be a valuable tool to optimise and study the interaction effects of different components for the development of stable Pickering nanoemulsions
In-situ observation of evolving microstructural damage and associated effective electro-mechanical properties of PZT during bipolar electrical fatigue
We investigate the fatigue behavior of bulk polycrystalline lead zirconate titanate (PZT) during bipolar electric field cycling. We characterize the frequency- and cycle-dependent degradation in both the effective electro-mechanical properties (specifically, the electrical hysteresis and the macroscopic viscoelastic stiffness and damping measured by Broadband Electromechanical Spectroscopy, BES) and the microstructural damage evolution (quantified via scanning electron microscopy). The BES setup enables the mechanical characterization while performing electrical cycling so as to measure the evolving viscoelasticity without remounting the sample; particularly measuring the viscoelastic damping allows us to gain insight into the ferroelectric domain wall activity across the full electric hysteresis and over the full range of cycles. A clear dependence on the electric cycling frequency is observed in the rates of degradation of all measured properties including an up to 10% increase in dynamic compliance and a 70% decrease in electric displacement magnitude. We quantify the evolving micro-crack density across wide ranges of numbers of cycles and compare with changes in the effective compliance. Interestingly, the observed strong degradation in the ferroelectric hysteresis is contrasted by relatively mild changes in the effective viscoelastic moduli, while samples clearly indicate increasing levels of micro-damage
From SMOTE to Mixup for Deep Imbalanced Classification
Given imbalanced data, it is hard to train a good classifier using deep
learning because of the poor generalization of minority classes. Traditionally,
the well-known synthetic minority oversampling technique (SMOTE) for data
augmentation, a data mining approach for imbalanced learning, has been used to
improve this generalization. However, it is unclear whether SMOTE also benefits
deep learning. In this work, we study why the original SMOTE is insufficient
for deep learning, and enhance SMOTE using soft labels. Connecting the
resulting soft SMOTE with Mixup, a modern data augmentation technique, leads to
a unified framework that puts traditional and modern data augmentation
techniques under the same umbrella. A careful study within this framework shows
that Mixup improves generalization by implicitly achieving uneven margins
between majority and minority classes. We then propose a novel margin-aware
Mixup technique that more explicitly achieves uneven margins. Extensive
experimental results demonstrate that our proposed technique yields
state-of-the-art performance on deep imbalanced classification while achieving
superior performance on extremely imbalanced data. The code is open-sourced in
our developed package https://github.com/ntucllab/imbalanced-DL to foster
future research in this direction.Comment: 25 pages, 3 figures. The paper is accepted by TAAI 202
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