Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Applicability of Dynamic Mechanical and Thermal Methods in Investigation of Ageing Processes of Double Based Rocket Propellants

Ageing of double based rocket propellants (DBR), as a consequence of chemical decomposition reaction, as well as physical processes (migration of low molecular constituents: plasticizers, etc.) has significant influence on their relevant properties (e.g. decrease of molar mass of nitrocellulose, decrease of stabiliser content, decrease of specimen mass, change of mechanical and thermal properties, etc.). The change of relevant properties of DBR propellants limits their safe and reliable service life. Even more, under certain conditions decomposition of a DBR propellant may become autocatalytic, which can lead to self-ignition of the DBR propellant. Because of that, it is very important to find out reliable methods for determination of propellant stability at a given moment of time, as well as to predict self-ignition probability under given conditions. In this work we studied dynamic mechanical and thermal properties of DBR propellants artificially aged for different period of time at 90°C, in order to detect and quantify changes in dynamic mechanical and thermal properties that can be used in the propellants stability assessment. Dynamic mechanical properties were studied by dynamic mechanical analysis (DMA), while thermal properties were studied using differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) and thermogravimetry (TGA). The obtained results showed that the ageing caused significant changes of DMA, DSC and TGA curves’ shape. The changes are quantified by following of some characteristic points on DMA, DSC and TGA curves. It was found out that the most sensitive parameters/characteristic points to the ageing process at DMA curves are: storage modulus at 25 °C, storage modulus at softening region, peak width and height on loss modulus curve, glass transition temperature, loss modulus at viscoelastic region, tan  maximum at viscoelastic region, while the most sensitive parameters at DSC and TGA curves are: peak height and width, heat of reaction, max. heat flow rate, mass loss at a given time, and rate of mass loss at a given time.
Barley Productivity, Carbon Isotope Discrimination and Nitrogen Utilization Efficiency as Affected b

A field experiment was conducted to determine barley productivity, carbon discrimination analysis and Nitrogen Utilization Efficiency (NUE) under rainfed and Supplemental Irrigation (SI) conditions for two seasons. The treatments consisted of two water (rainfed and SI) and two N (zero and 50 kg N ha-1) levels. At harvest, barley grain yield was recorded and shoot and grain samples were taken for chemical analysis, dry matter determination and carbon and nitrogen isotope compositions analysis. Grain yield increased with SI and with N addition under SI only suggesting the soil moisture is the more limiting growth factor. Nitrogen uptake was higher with SI in both seasons and with N in the second season. Grain and N uptake derived from fertilizer were higher with SI in both seasons. SI increased the soil moisture and therefore, increased the NUE in the second season only but not in the first drier season. Carbon isotope discrimination was higher with SI and decreased with N application. Carbon isotope discrimination correlated positively with grain yield and shoot dry matter in the second season only and with the Water Use Efficiency (WUE) in the first drier season. Therefore, it can be concluded that SI increased barley production and NUE. In addition, carbon isotope discrimination can be used as tools for predicting barley production in relatively wet season and WUE in the drier season.
The effect of feeding pods of multipurpose trees (MPTs) on the degradability of dry matter and cell wall constituents of maize stover and alfalfa incubated in the rumen of sheep

This study evaluated the effects of feeding alfalfa and pods of tree legumes on rumen pH and ammonia concentration as well as in sacco degradability of dry matter and fibre constituents of maize stover, alfalfa hay and their neutral detergent extracts. The feeds were incubated in the rumens of five South African Merino sheep fed individually in an incomplete (5 × 4) Latin square design using five diets. The diets comprised equal proportions of pasture hay and either alfalfa (Alfalfa diet) or pods of Acacia sieberiana (Sieberiana diet), Acacia nilotica (Nilotica diet) or Leucaena leucocephala (Leucaena diet). The fifth diet was composed of pasture hay alone (Hay diet) and served as a negative control. Supplementation of hay with either legume pods or alfalfa significantly (p 0.05) the degradability constants lag time (LT), slowly degradable fraction (B), potential degradability (PD), effective degradability (ED) and rate of degradation (C) of dry matter (DM) but significantly (p < 0.01) affected ED of the fibre constituents of the incubated feeds. The effective degradabilities of the incubated feeds differed (p < 0.001), with alfalfa and maize stover having average values of 555 and 318 g kg−1 DM respectively. The rate of degradation of alfalfa was also higher (p < 0.01) than that of maize stover. Neutral detergent extraction improved ED of the cell wall constituents of maize stover but produced the opposite effect for alfalfa. The interactions between incubation feed and extract were significant (p < 0.01) for ED and C of neutral detergent fibre and hemicellulose. The observations show that pods from tree legumes are comparable to alfalfa in the provision of rumen ammonia but limit microbial activity in the degradability of fibre constituents. They also show that maize stover and alfalfa differ in their degradabilities and that the differences may be attributed to their cell wall chemistry. © 2001 Society of Chemical Industry
A Theoretical Study of Gas Bubble Dynamics in Tissue

The behavior of cavitation bubbles in tissue driven by ultrasonic fields is an important problem in biomedical acoustics. The present solution combines the Keller‐Miksis equation for nonlinear bubble dynamics with the linear Voigt model for viscoelastic media and experimental values for the model’s parameters (rigidity G=0, 0.5 – 2.5 MPa and viscosity μ=0.005 or 0.015 Pa⋅s). Two and 3‐component models are used to study the oscillations of gas bubbles in tissue and in partially digested tissue. Numerical computations are performed for a variety of cases. Inertial cavitation thresholds (Pt) are determined for various equilibrium radii, frequencies and threshold criteria. Bubble‐induced tissue displacement and strain is also investigated for several representative tissue types. It is found that: 1) thresholds in tissue are up to 10 times those in liquid, 2) Pt increases nearly linearly with frequency, 3) there is an optimal relation between the microbubble and tissue radii that maximizes the displacement of .
Quantitative examination of the thermoelectric power of n-type Si in the phonon drag regime

A quantitative comparison between theory and experiment is presented for the thermoelectric power of n‐type Si at low temperatures, where crystal boundary scattering of phonons is predominant. The expression for the Seebeck coefficient is obtained by simultaneously solving the coupled Boltzmann equations for electrons and phonons. The thermoelectric power is measured from samples of two different donor concentrations (ND=8×1014 cm−3 and 7×1015 cm−3) at temperatures ranging from 25 to 200 K, where the thickness is varied by etching the samples (370–73 μm). The phonon mean free path for crystal boundary scattering, determined from experimental thermopower, agrees well with that gained from the theory of thermal conductivity corrected for the phonon velocities of interest. An additional measurement of the thermal conductivity yields the mean free path for phonon–phonon scattering, which is about two orders of magnitude less than that obtained from thermopower. This difference confirms the influence of the di.
Integrating seepage heterogeneity with the use of ganged seepage meters

The usefulness of standard half‐barrel seepage meters for measurement of fluxes between groundwater, and surface water is limited by the small bed area that each measurement represents and the relatively large associated labor costs. Standard half‐barrel cylinders were ganged together to allow one measurement of the summed seepage through all of the meters, reducing labor cost and increasing the representative area of measurement. Comparisons of ganged versus individual‐meter measurements at two lakes, under both inseepage and outseepage conditions, indicate little loss of efficiency resulting from routing seepage water through the ganging system. Differences between summed and ganged seepage rates were not significant for all but the fastest rates of seepage. At flow rates greater than about 250 mL min−1, ganged values were as low as 80% of summed values. Gangedmeter head losses also were calculated to determine their significance relative to hydraulic‐head gradients measured at the field sites. The calculated reduction in hydraulic gradient beneath the seepage meters was significant only for the largest measured seepage rates. A calibration tank was used to determine single‐meter and gangedmeter efficiencies compared to known seepage rates. Single‐cylinder seepage meters required an average correction factor of 1.05 to convert measured to actual values, whereas the ganged measurements made in the tank required a larger correction factor of 1.14. Although manual measurements were used in these tests, the concept of ganging seepage cylinders also would be useful when used in conjunction with automated flowmeters.
DURABILITY OF CONCRETE IN ACIDIC SOILS AND WATERS

This article reviews current recommendations for the type of concrete suitable for use in acidic conditions, expecially in contact with acidic groundwater, and the limited data on concrete performance available. Types of acidic waters are first described (ie waters containing mineral acids, humic acids or carbolic acids). Factors controlling the rate of attack on concrete by such acidity are also discussed. It is the rate of penetration of the acid which will govern the durability of the concrete and the chief factors to consider are: a) chemical factors such as type of acid and its ph, the cementitious binder and the type of aggregate; B) physical factors relating to the composition of the concrete and the type of exposure. For example, the existence of a head of water on one side of the concrete or movement of water over the concrete surface; c) soil type and permeability; d) goundwater. Tables giving requirements for concrete exposed to: i) sulphate, II) acidic water; and III) attack from acids of ph greater than 2.5 are provided as is a table setting out the French standard for concrete in acid and sulphate groundwaters. A procedure for the classification of acid soils and waters is also suggested.
Trash Talk: Accelerating Garbage Collection on Integrated GPUs is Worthless

Systems integrating heterogeneous processors with unified memory provide seamless integration among these processors with minimal development complexity. These systems integrate accelerators such as GPUs on the same die with CPU cores to accommodate running parallel applications with varying levels of parallelism. Such integration is becoming very common on modern chip architectures, and it places a burden (or opportunity) on application and system programmers to utilize the full potential of such integrated chips. In this paper we evaluate whether we can obtain any performance benefits from running garbage collection on integrated GPU systems, and discuss how difficult it would be to realize these gains for the programmer. Proliferation of garbage-collected languages running on a variety of platforms from handheld mobile devices to data centers makes garbage collection an interesting target to examine on such platforms and can offer valuable lessons for other applications. We present our analysis of running garbage collection on integrated systems and find that the current state of these systems does not provide an advantage for accelerating such a task. We build a framework that allows us to offload garbage collection tasks on integrated GPU systems from within the JVM. We identify dominant phases of garbage collection and study the viability of offloading them to the integrated GPU. We show that performance advantages are limited, partly because an integrated GPU has limited advantage in memory bandwidth over the CPU, and partly because of costly atomic operations.
Subfield codes of linear codes from perfect nonlinear functions and their duals

Let $\mathbb{F}_{p^m}$ be a finite field with $p^m$ elements, where $p$ is an odd prime and $m$ is a positive integer. Recently, \cite{Hengar} and \cite{Wang2020} determined the weight distributions of subfield codes with the form $$\mathcal{C}_f=\left\{\left(\left( {\rm Tr}_1^m(a f(x)+bx)+c\right)_{x \in \mathbb{F}_{p^m}}, {\rm Tr}_1^m(a)\right)\, : \, a,b \in \mathbb{F}_{p^m}, c \in \mathbb{F}_p\right\}$$ for $f(x)=x^2$ and $f(x)=x^{p^k+1}$, respectively, where $k$ is a nonnegative integer. In this paper, we further investigate the subfield code $\mathcal{C}_f$ for $f(x)$ being a known perfect nonlinear function over $\mathbb{F}_{p^m}$ and generalize some results in \cite{Hengar,Wang2020}. The weight distributions of the constructed codes are determined by applying the theory of quadratic forms and the properties of perfect nonlinear functions over finite fields. In addition, the parameters of the duals of these codes are also determined. Several examples show that some of our codes and their duals have the best known parameters with respect to the code tables in \cite{MGrassl}. The duals of some proposed codes are optimal with respect to the Sphere Packing bound if $p\geq 5$.
Charged Defect Quantification in Pt/Al2O3/In0.53Ga0.47As/InP MOS Capacitors

This work focuses on the separation and quantification of fixed bulk oxide charge, fixed charge at the dielectric-semiconductor interface and interface state charge components in the Pt/Al 2 O 3 /In 0.53 Ga 0.47 As metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) system. The availability of atomic layer deposited Al 2 O 3 dielectrics over n- and p-type In 0.53 Ga 0.47 As with a range of well-controlled thickness values opens up an experimental route for the determination of the interface state density (D it ) independently of the total fixed oxide charge using capacitance-voltage measurements taken at 1 MHz and -50°C. Low temperature forming gas annealing (350°C) significantly reduces the amount of fixed charge. The interface fixed charge is reduced from ~ -8.5 x 10 12 cm -2 preanneal to ~-7.4 × 10 11 cm -2 postanneal and the bulk oxide charge is reduced from ~1.4 x 10 19 cm -3 preanneal to ~5 x 10 1 cm -3 postanneal. The forming gas anneal also has a significant effect on the interface state charge, reducing its density from 1.3 x 10 13 cm -2 preanneal to 4 x 10 12 cm -2 postanneal.
Persistence of hydrodynamic envelope solitons: Detection and rogue wave occurrence

The observation of a wave group persisting for more than 200 periods in the direct numerical simulation of nonlinear unidirectional irregular water waves in deep water is discussed. The simulation conditions are characterized by parameters realistic for broad-banded waves in the sea. The group is identified by the solution of the associated scattering problem for the nonlinear Schrodinger equation as the intense envelope soliton with remarkably stable parameters. Most of extreme waves occur on top of this group, resulting in higher and longer rogue wave events.
Trembling-Hand Perfection and Correlation in Sequential Games

We initiate the study of trembling-hand perfection in sequential (i.e., extensive-form) games with correlation. We introduce the extensive-form perfect correlated equilibrium (EFPCE) as a refinement of the classical extensive-form correlated equilibrium (EFCE) that amends its weaknesses off the equilibrium path. This is achieved by accounting for the possibility that the players may make mistakes while following recommendations independently at each information set of the game. After providing an axiomatic definition of EFPCE, we show that one always exists since any perfect (Nash) equilibrium constitutes an EFPCE, and that it is a refinement of EFCE, as any EFPCE is also an EFCE. Then, we prove that, surprisingly, computing an EFPCE is not harder than finding an EFCE, since the problem can be solved in polynomial time for general n-player extensive-form games (also with chance). This is achieved by formulating the problem as that of finding a limit solution (as $\epsilon \rightarrow 0$) to a suitably defined trembling LP parametrized by $\epsilon$, featuring exponentially-many variables and polynomially-many constraints. To this end, we show how a recently developed polynomial-time algorithm for trembling LPs can be adapted to deal with problems having an exponential number of variables. This calls for the solution of a sequence of (non-trembling) LPs with exponentially-many variables and polynomially-many constraints, which is possible in polynomial time by applying an ellipsoid against hope approach.
6-Layer Model for a Structured Description and Categorization of Urban Traffic and Environment

Verification and validation of automated driving functions impose large challenges. Currently, scenario-based approaches are investigated in research and industry, aiming at a reduction of testing efforts by specifying safety relevant scenarios. To define those scenarios and operate in a complex real-world design domain, a structured description of the environment is needed. Within the PEGASUS research project, the 6-Layer Model (6LM) was introduced for the description of highway scenarios. This paper refines the 6LM and extends it to urban traffic and environment. As defined in PEGASUS, the 6LM provides the possibility to categorize the environment and, therefore, functions as a structured basis for subsequent scenario description. The model enables a structured description and categorization of the general environment, without incorporating any knowledge or anticipating any functions of actors. Beyond that, there is a variety of other applications of the 6LM, which are elaborated in this paper. The 6LM includes a description of the road network and traffic guidance objects, roadside structures, temporary modifications of the former, dynamic objects, environmental conditions and digital information. The work at hand specifies each layer by categorizing its items. Guidelines are formulated and explanatory examples are given to standardize the application of the model for an objective environment description. In contrast to previous publications, the model and its design are described in far more detail. Finally, the holistic description of the 6LM presented includes remarks on possible future work when expanding the concept to machine perception aspects.
Effects of a Thermal Inversion Experiment on STEM Students Learning and Application of Damped Harmonic Motion

There are diverse teaching methodologies to promote both collaborative and individual work in undergraduate physics courses. However, few educational studies seek to understand how students learn and apply new knowledge through open-ended activities that require mathematical modeling and experimentation focused on environmental problems. Here, we propose a novel home experiment to simulate the dynamics of a flue gas under temperature inversion and model it as damped harmonic motion. After designing and conducting the experiment, twenty six first year students enrolled in STEM majors answered six qualitative questions to inform us about their epistemological beliefs regarding their learning process. Their answers imply that this type of open-ended experiments may facilitate students’ understanding of physical phenomena and point to the significance of physics instructors as promoters of epistemological development. In general, students described this activity as a positive experience that helped them connect an environmental phenomenon with a fundamental physics concept.
Acoustic Leak Detection in Water Networks

In this work, we present a general procedure for acoustic leak detection in water networks that satisfies multiple real-world constraints such as energy efficiency and ease of deployment. Based on recordings from seven contact microphones attached to the water supply network of a municipal suburb, we trained several shallow and deep anomaly detection models. Inspired by how human experts detect leaks using electronic sounding-sticks, we use these models to repeatedly listen for leaks over a predefined decision horizon. This way we avoid constant monitoring of the system. While we found the detection of leaks in close proximity to be a trivial task for almost all models, neural network based approaches achieve better results at the detection of distant leaks.
State-of-the-Art Machine Learning MRI Reconstruction in 2020: Results of the Second fastMRI Challenge

Accelerating MRI scans is one of the principal outstanding problems in the MRI research community. Towards this goal, we hosted the second fastMRI competition targeted towards reconstructing MR images with subsampled k-space data. We provided participants with data from 7,299 clinical brain scans (de-identified via a HIPAA-compliant procedure by NYU Langone Health), holding back the fully-sampled data from 894 of these scans for challenge evaluation purposes. In contrast to the 2019 challenge, we focused our radiologist evaluations on pathological assessment in brain images. We also debuted a new Transfer track that required participants to submit models evaluated on MRI scanners from outside the training set. We received 19 submissions from eight different groups. Results showed one team scoring best in both SSIM scores and qualitative radiologist evaluations. We also performed analysis on alternative metrics to mitigate the effects of background noise and collected feedback from the participants to inform future challenges. Lastly, we identify common failure modes across the submissions, highlighting areas of need for future research in the MRI reconstruction community.
Light and scanning electron microscopy of duodenum of cattle (Bos indicus), Asian elephant (Elephas maximus) and Greater one horn Rhinoceros (Rhinoceros unicornis)

The present study was conducted on duodenum of Cattle, Elephant and Greater one Horn Rhinoceros for histology and scanning electron microscopy. The mucosal surface of duodenum of cattle, Elephant and Greater one Horn Rhinoceros contained villi and villi were lined by simple columnar epithelium. Lamina propria-submucosa contains intestinal gland along with abundant collagen fibers. Tunica muscularis layer was composed of thick inner circular and outer longitudinal layer. In Elephant, Tunica muscularis as well as Tunica serosa layers were more prominent compared to the Cattle and Rhinoceros. Abundant connective tissue fibers were found in the tunica sub mucosa layer. In scanning electron microscope, the duodenal villi of cattle were broad and wide with a short height along with numerous opening of goblet cells. In Elephant, the shapes of the duodenal villi were leaf shaped and taller than Cattle. The thicknesses of the muscle fibers were more compared to the Cattle and Rhinoceros. In Rhinoceros, the height of the villi was more compared to the Cattle and Elephant. The villi were cone shaped with a broad base and a pointed apex. These villi contain numerous enterocytes along with opening of goblet cells.