A polynomial regression model for stabilized turbulent confined jet diffusion flames using bluff body burners

AbstractThermal structure of stabilized confined jet diffusion flames in the presence of different geometries of bluff body burners has been mathematically modeled. Two stabilizer disc burners tapered at 30° and 60° and another frusted cone of 60°/30° inclination angle were employed all having the same diameter of 80(mm) acting as flame holders. The measured radial mean temperature profiles of the developing stabilizing flames at different normalized axial distances were considered as the model example of the physical process.A polynomial mathematical model of fourth degree has been investigated to study this phenomenon to find the best correlation representing the experimental data. Least Squares regression analysis has been employed to estimate the coefficients of the polynomial and investigate its adequacy. High values for R2>0.9 obtained for most of the investigated bluff burners at the various locations of x/dj prove the adequacy of the suggested polynomial for representing the experimental results. Very small values of significance F<(α=0.05) for all investigated cases indicate that there is a real relationship between the independent variable r and the dependant variable T. The low values of p<(α=0.05) obtained reveal that all the recorded parameters for all the investigated cases are significant

Using unsupervised learning to partition 3D city scenes for distributed building energy microsimulation

Microsimulation is a class of Urban Building Energy Modeling techniques in which energetic interactions between buildings are explicitly resolved. Examples include SUNtool and CitySim+, both of which employ a sophisticated radiosity-based algorithm to solve for radiation exchange. The computational cost of this algorithm increases in proportion to the square of the number of surfaces of which an urban scene is comprised. To simulate large scenes, of the order of 10,000 to 1,000,000 surfaces, it is desirable to divide the scene to distribute the simulation task. However, this partitioning is not trivial as the energy-related interactions create uneven inter-dependencies between computing nodes. To this end, we describe in this paper two approaches (K-means and Greedy Community Detection algorithms) for partitioning urban scenes, and subsequently performing building energy microsimulation using CitySim+ on a distributed memory High-Performance Computing Cluster. To compare the performance of these partitioning techniques, we propose two measures evaluating the extent to which the obtained clusters exploit data locality. We show that our approach using Greedy Community Detection performs well in terms of exploiting data locality and reducing inter-dependencies among sub-scenes, but at the expense of a higher data preparation cost and algorithm run-time

Multiple Patterns of FHIT Gene Homozygous Deletion in Egyptian Breast Cancer Patients

Fragile histidine triad (FHIT) gene encodes a putative tumour suppressor protein. Loss of Fhit protein in cancer is attributed to different genetic alterations that affect the FHIT gene structure. In this study, we investigated the pattern of homozygous deletion that target the FHIT gene exons 3 to 9 genomic structure in Egyptian breast cancer patients. We have found that 65% (40 out of 62) of the cases exhibited homozygous deletion in at least one FHIT exon. The incidence of homozygous deletion was not associated with patients' clinicopathological parameters including patients' age, tumour grade, tumour type, and lymph node involvement. Using correlation analysis, we have observed a strong correlation between homozygous deletions of exon 3 and exon 4 (P < 0.0001). Deletions in exon 5 were positively correlated with deletions in exon 7 (P < 0.0001), Exon 8 (P < 0.027), and exon 9 (P = 0.04). Additionally, a strong correlation was observed between exons 8 and exon 9 (P < 0.0001).We conclude that FHIT gene exons are homozygously deleted at high frequency in Egyptian women population diagnosed with breast cancer. Three different patterns of homozygous deletion were observed in this population indicating different mechanisms of targeting FHIT gene genomic structure

Predicting residential building age from map data

The age of a building influences its form and fabric composition and this in turn is critical to inferring its energy performance. However, often this data is unknown. In this paper, we present a methodology to automatically identify the construction period of houses, for the purpose of urban energy modelling and simulation. We describe two major stages to achieving this – a per-building classification model and post-classification analysis to improve the accuracy of the class inferences. In the first stage, we extract measures of the morphology and neighbourhood characteristics from readily available topographic mapping, a high-resolution Digital Surface Model and statistical boundary data. These measures are then used as features within a random forest classifier to infer an age category for each building. We evaluate various predictive model combinations based on scenarios of available data, evaluating these using 5-fold cross-validation to train and tune the classifier hyper-parameters based on a sample of city properties. A separate sample estimated the best performing cross-validated model as achieving 77% accuracy. In the second stage, we improve the inferred per-building age classification (for a spatially contiguous neighbourhood test sample) through aggregating prediction probabilities using different methods of spatial reasoning. We report on three methods for achieving this based on adjacency relations, near neighbour graph analysis and graph-cuts label optimisation. We show that post-processing can improve the accuracy by up to 8 percentage points

Modelling Urban Housing Stocks for Building Energy Simulation using CityGML EnergyADE

Understanding the energy demand of a city’s housing stock is an important focus for local and national administrations to identify strategies for reducing carbon emissions. Building energy simulation offers a promising approach to understand energy use and test plans to improve the efficiency of residential properties. As part of this, models of the urban stock must be created that accurately reflect its size, shape and composition. However, substantial effort is required in order to generate detailed urban scenes with the appropriate level of attribution suitable for spatially explicit simulation of large areas. Furthermore, the computational complexity of microsimulation of building energy necessitates consideration of approaches that reduce this processing overhead. We present a workflow to automatically generate 2.5D urban scenes for residential building energy simulation from UK mapping datasets. We describe modelling the geometry, the assignment of energy characteristics based upon a statistical model and adopt the CityGML EnergyADE schema which forms an important new and open standard for defining energy model information at the city-scale. We then demonstrate use of the resulting urban scenes for estimating heating demand using a spatially explicit building energy microsimulation tool, called CitySim+, and evaluate the effects of an off-the-shelf geometric simplification routine to reduce simulation computational complexity

Vacuum solutions of the gravitational field equations in the brane world model

We consider some classes of solutions of the static, spherically symmetric gravitational field equations in the vacuum in the brane world scenario, in which our Universe is a three-brane embedded in a higher dimensional space-time. The vacuum field equations on the brane are reduced to a system of two ordinary differential equations, which describe all the geometric properties of the vacuum as functions of the dark pressure and dark radiation terms (the projections of the Weyl curvature of the bulk, generating non-local brane stresses). Several classes of exact solutions of the vacuum gravitational field equations on the brane are derived. In the particular case of a vanishing dark pressure the integration of the field equations can be reduced to the integration of an Abel type equation. A perturbative procedure, based on the iterative solution of an integral equation, is also developed for this case. Brane vacuums with particular symmetries are investigated by using Lie group techniques. In the case of a static vacuum brane admitting a one-parameter group of conformal motions the exact solution of the field equations can be found, with the functional form of the dark radiation and pressure terms uniquely fixed by the symmetry. The requirement of the invariance of the field equations with respect to the quasi-homologous group of transformations also imposes a unique, linear proportionality relation between the dark energy and dark pressure. A homology theorem for the static, spherically symmetric gravitational field equations in the vacuum on the brane is also proven.Comment: 13 pages, no figures, to appear in PR

Safety and Efficacy of Sertraline for Depression in Patients with CHF (SADHART-CHF): A randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial of sertraline for major depression with congestive heart failure

Sertraline, a selective serotonin-reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), has demonstrated substantial mood improvement in patients with post myocardial infarction or with unstable angina. The impact of sertraline on the prognosis and depression of patients with chronic heart failure (HF) and co-morbid major depressive disorder (MDD) is unknown

Mice lacking the Cβ subunit of PKA are resistant to angiotensin II-induced cardiac hypertrophy and dysfunction

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>PKA is a ubiquitous, multi-subunit cellular kinase that regulates a number of different physiological responses in response to cAMP, including metabolism, cell division, and cardiac function. Numerous studies have implicated altered PKA signaling in cardiac dysfunction. Recently, it has been shown that mice lacking the catalytic β subunit of PKA (PKA Cβ) are protected from age-related problems such as weight gain and enlarged livers, and we hypothesized that these mice might also be resistant to cardiomyopathy.</p> <p>Findings</p> <p>Angiotensin II (ang II) induced hypertension in both PKA Cβ null mice and their WT littermates. However, PKA Cβ null mice were resistant to a number of ang II-induced, cardiopathological effects observed in the WT mice, including hypertrophy, decreased diastolic performance, and enlarged left atria.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The Cβ subunit of PKA plays an important role in angiotensin-induced cardiac dysfunction. The Cβ null mouse highlights the potential of the PKA Cβ subunit as a pharmaceutical target for hypertrophic cardiac disease.</p

Safety and Efficacy of Sertraline for Depression in Patients With Heart Failure: Results of the SADHART-CHF Trial

The objective was to test the hypothesis that heart failure (HF) patients treated with sertraline will have lower depression scores and fewer cardiovascular events compared to placebo