Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Structure and dynamics of amorphous polymers: computer simulations compared to experiment and theory

This contribution considers recent developments in the computer modelling of amorphous polymeric materials. Progress in our capabilities to build models for the computer simulation of polymers from the detailed atomistic scale up to coarse-grained mesoscopic models, together with the ever-improving performance of computers, have led to important insights from computer simulations into the structural and dynamic properties of amorphous polymers. Structurally, chain connectivity introduces a range of length scales from that of the chemical bond to the radius of gyration of the polymer chain covering 2–4 orders of magnitude. Dynamically, this range of length scales translates into an even larger range of time scales observable in relaxation processes in amorphous polymers ranging from about 10−13 to 10−3 s or even to 103 s when glass dynamics is concerned. There is currently no single simulation technique that is able to describe all these length and time scales efficiently. On large length and time scales basic topology and entropy become the governing properties and this fact can be exploited using computer simulations of coarse-grained polymer models to study universal aspects of the structure and dynamics of amorphous polymers. On the largest length and time scales chain connectivity is the dominating factor leading to the strong increase in longest relaxation times described within the reptation theory of polymer melt dynamics. Recently, many of the universal aspects of this behaviour have been further elucidated by computer simulations of coarse-grained polymer models. On short length scales the detailed chemistry and energetics of the polymer are important, and one has to be able to capture them correctly using chemically realistic modelling of specific polymers, even when the aim is to extract generic physical behaviour exhibited by the specific chemistry. Detailed studies of chemically realistic models highlight the central importance of torsional dynamics in all relaxation processes in polymer materials. Finally, the interplay between local energetics, both intramolecular and intermolecular, and the local packing governs the glass transition in polymer melts.
SERUM CHOLECALCIFEROL IN BRONCHIAL ASTHMA AND ITS ASSOCIATION WITH ASTHMA SEVERITY

Vitamin D ABSTRACT Objective: Determining the serum cholecalciferol in bronchial asthma and its association with asthma severity in adult patients. Study Design: Cross sectional study design. Place and Duration: Department of Medicine, Liaquat University Hospital, Hyderabad from March 2017 to May 2018. Subjects and Methods: 100 adults diagnosed of bronchial asthma and similar number of age and gender matched controls were analyzed for the serum cholecalciferol. Asthma severities were categorized as intermittent, mild, and moderate and sever persistent asthma. Serum cholecalciferol sufficiency, insufficiency and deficiency were defined as > 30 ng/mL), 20-30 ng/mL and < 20 ng/mL respectively. Serum cholecalciferol and serum IgE were detected from venous blood samples. Statistical software (SPSS v 22.0, IBM, Incorporation, USA) was used for data analysis at 95% confidence interval (P ≤ 0.05). Results: Serum cholecalciferol in controls was 38.19±15.67 ng/dl compared to 24.87±13.54 ng/dl in cases (P=0.0001). Severe cholecalciferol deficiency was noted in mild persistent asthma cases (17.90±6.51 ng/dl). Serum IgE, Eosinophils and Serum Cholecalciferol shows statistically significant differences between controls and cases (P<0.05). Serum cholecalciferol insufficiency and deficiency in controls was found in 51% compared to 85% in cases (P=0.0001) (table IV). Pearson`s correlation shows negative association of Serum Ig E (r= - 0.523 ** , p=0.0001) and blood eosinophils (r= - 0.629 ** , p=0.0001) with serum cholecalciferol. Conclusion: The present study found low serum cholecalciferol in bronchial asthma that shows negative correlation with asthma severity, serum IgE and blood eosinophils.
Seletividade de herbicidas, aplicados em pós-emergência, às plantas de alfafa

Two experiments were carried out in a greenhouse, belonging to the Departamento de Defesa Fitissanitaria da Faculdade de Ciencias Agrarias e Veterinarias de Jaboticabal/UNESP, with the purpose of evaluating the selectivity of different used post-emergence herbicides on alfafa plants. The experimental design was completely randomized to evaluate the phytotoxical effects of following herbicides: MSMA, clethodim plus mineral oil, lactofen, fluazifop-p-butil, fomesafen plus mineral oil, haloxyfop-methyl plus mineral oil, chlorimuron-ethyl, halosulfuron plus mineral oil, nicosulfuron, acifluorfen, imazethapyr, bentazon plus mineral oil and cyanazine plus mineral oil. The herbicides visual phytotoxical effects, plant height, and shoot production of dry matter, on the period of initial development and after the first regrowth of these plants were evaluated. N the second experiment, the same scheme for installing and carrying out was used, using different doses of MSMA, chlorimuronethyl, imazethapyr, bentazon, bentazon plus mineral oil, clethodin, clethodim plus mineral oil and bentazon plus MSMA. The most selective herbicides for alfafa were haloxyfop-methyl, fluazifop-p-butil, fenoxaprop-ethyl, MSMA, imazethapyr, bentazon and clethodim. (isolated and addicionated of mineral oil).
A critical analysis of Z-source converters considering the effects of internal resistances

ABSTRACT Nowadays Z-source networks are the most promising power converter networks that cover almost all electric power conversion (dc–dc, dc–ac, ac–dc and ac–ac) applications. However, the controller design is critical for Z-source converter (ZSC) due to the presence right-half-plane zero (RHPZ) in the control-to-capacitor-voltage transfer function. This RHPZ exhibits non-minimum phase undershoot in the capacitor voltage and also in the dc-link voltage waveforms. A perfect small-signal model is required to predict locations of the RHP zero and its dynamics. This paper contributes towards the small-signal analysis of ZSC under continuous conduction mode considering the parasitic resistance of the inductor, equivalent series resistance of the capacitor, internal resistances of active switch and forward voltage drop of the diode. The maximum allowable value of shoot-through duty ratio (STDR) and voltage gain for different values of the internal resistance and load resistance are discussed in this paper. The accuracy of the developed small-signal average model is compared with detailed circuit model in MATLAB/SIMULINK. Finally, the steady-state simulation results of ZSC are validated with hardware results.
Automatic Calibration Method of Channel Mismatches for Wideband TI-ADC System

Time-interleaved analog-to-digital converter (TI-ADC) technology can increase the sampling rate without changing resolution. But, the dynamic performance of TI-ADC system is seriously deteriorated by channel mismatches. Under the condition of large bandwidth, gain mismatch and timing mismatch vary with the frequency, which cannot be regarded as fixed values. To improve the dynamic performance of the TI-ADC system, an automatic calibration method of channel mismatches for wideband TI-ADC system is proposed in this article. Frequency-dependent channel mismatches are estimated by the algorithm based on sine fitting, and compensated by the means based on perfect reconstruction. The entire sampling and calculation process is automated and tedious operation is simplified. A 6.8-GS/s 12-bit wideband TI-ADC system is implemented. This sampling system can achieve SNDR (signal-to-noise and distortion ratio) above 49 dB and SFDR (spurious-free dynamic range) above 57 dB for an input signal from 100 MHz to 3300 MHz. The proposed calibration method improves the SNDR over 10 dB and the SFDR over 15 dB. The dynamic performance of the sampling system is close to that of its sub-ADC.
EVALITA. Evaluation of NLP and Speech Tools for Italian

This paper describes the design and reports the results of two questionnaires. The first of these questionnaires was created to collect information about the interest of industrial companies in the field of Italian text/speech analytics towards the evaluation campaign EVALITA; the second to gather comments and suggestions for the future of the evaluation and of its final workshop from the participants and the organizers of the campaign on the last two editions (2011 and 2014). Novelties introduced in the organization of EVALITA 2016 on the basis of the questionnaires results are also reported.
Fault Current Estimation in Multi-Terminal HVdc Grids Considering MMC Control

DC faults are critical events for the multi-terminal HVdc protection systems, where knowing the critical fault time is fundamental in the protections design. Existing literature analyzes the critical fault time with simulations or with complex analysis, requiring large computational effort and they are not robust to parameters variations. Furthermore, standard approaches rely on simplified modular multilevel converter (MMC) models neglecting the influence of converter control loops dynamic. As result, the prediction of the node voltages and especially the dc currents become increasingly inaccurate as bigger is the distance from the fault. This paper introduces a fault current estimation method in MMC-based multi-terminal dc (MTdc) grids, which improves the current differential equation based methodologies including the dynamics of power and dc voltage controllers. The proposed method gives the possibility of analyzing the fault current under different grid conditions (e.g., fault resistance and limiting inductor value). Furthermore, this method is extended to bipolar MTdc systems in case of pole-to-pole and pole-to-ground faults, and it is validated by means of simulations in PSCAD environment and standard CIGRE MTdc grid.
Clustering-Based Residential Baseline Estimation: A Probabilistic Perspective

Demand response (DR) is one of the most cost-effective solutions for providing flexibility to power systems. The extensive deployment of DR trials and the roll-out of smart meters enable the quantification of consumer responsiveness to price signals via baseline estimation. The traditional deterministic baseline estimation approach can provide only a single value without consideration of uncertainty. This paper proposes a novel probabilistic baseline estimation framework that consists of a daily load profile pool construction stage, a deep learning-based clustering stage, an optimal cluster selection stage, and a quantile regression forests model construction stage. In particular, the concept of a daily load profile pool is introduced, and a deep-learning-based clustering approach is employed to handle a large number of daily patterns to further improve the baseline estimation performance. Case studies have been conducted on fine-grained smart meter data collected from a real dynamic time-of-use tariffs trial of the low carbon London project. The superior performance of the proposed method is demonstrated based on a series of evaluation metrics regarding both deterministic and probabilistic estimation results.
Molecular ion and metastable atom formations and their effects on the electron temperature in medium-pressure rare-gas positive-column plasmas

A theoretical study has been made of the medium-pressure rare-gas positive-column plasma by taking into account the effects of molecular ion formation, volume recombination and ionisation due to metastable atoms, simultaneously. Calculated values of the electron temperature and the densities of metastable atoms, molecular and atomic ions, at various gas pressures for both He and Ne gases are presented. Numerical results show that in a rare-gas positive-column plasma, molecular ions become dominant in the discharge as the gas pressure increases above approximately 10 Torr. Theoretical values are compared with the experimental data and discussed. A new method to determine the three-body conversion rate coefficient is also proposed.
Numerical Investigation of the Effects of Red Blood Cell Cytoplasmic Viscosity Contrasts on Single Cell and Bulk Transport Behaviour

In-silico cellular models of blood are invaluable to gain understanding about the many interesting properties that blood exhibits. However, numerical investigations that focus on the effects of cytoplasmic viscosity in these models are not very prevalent. We present a parallelised method to implement cytoplasmic viscosity for HemoCell, an open-source cellular model based on immersed boundary lattice Boltzmann methods, using an efficient ray-casting algorithm. The effects of the implementation are investigated with single-cell simulations focusing on the deformation in shear flow, the migration due to wall induced lift forces, the characteristic response time in periodic stretching and pair collisions between red blood cells and platelets. Collective transport phenomena are also investigated in many-cell simulations in a pressure driven channel flow. The simulations indicate that the addition of a viscosity contrast between internal and external fluids significantly affects the deformability of a red blood cell, which is most pronounced during very short time-scale events. Therefore, modelling the cytoplasmic viscosity contrast is important in scenarios with high velocity deformation, typically high shear rate flows.
3D RBI-EM reconstruction with spherically-symmetric basis function for SPECT rotating slat collimator

A single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) rotating slat collimator with strip detector acquires distance-weighted plane integral data, along with the attenuation factor and distance-dependent detector response. In order to image a 3D object, the slat collimator device has first to spin around its axis and then rotate around the object to produce 3D projection measurements. Compared to the slice-by-slice 2D reconstruction for the parallel-hole collimator and line integral data, a more complex 3D reconstruction is needed for the slat collimator and plane integral data. In this paper, we propose a 3D RBI-EM reconstruction algorithm with spherically-symmetric basis function, also called ‘blobs’, for the slat collimator. It has a closed and spherically symmetric analytical expression for the 3D Radon transform, which makes it easier to compute the plane integral than the voxel. It is completely localized in the spatial domain and nearly band-limited in the frequency domain. Its size and shape can be controlled by several parameters to have desired reconstructed image quality. A mathematical lesion phantom study has demonstrated that the blob reconstruction can achieve better contrast-noise trade-offs than the voxel reconstruction without greatly degrading the image resolution. A real lesion phantom study further confirmed this and showed that a slat collimator with CZT detector has better image quality than the conventional parallel-hole collimator with NaI detector. The improvement might be due to both the slat collimation and the better energy resolution of the CZT detector.
Adaptive ADMM for Distributed AC Optimal Power Flow

In light of the soaring uptake of distributed energy resources, distributed methods are attracting increased focus. This paper proposes an adaptive scheme to improve the convergence of the alternating direction of multipliers method (ADMM) on the component-based dual decomposition of the AC optimal power flow (OPF). The method incorporates a local curvature approximation scheme, with underlying parameter update steps inspired by the local residual balancing scheme, to automatically tune the penalty parameters locally, without central oversight. Substantial speed-ups over the vanilla ADMM, as high as <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$10.6$</tex-math></inline-formula> times, are demonstrated on real-world test systems with more than <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$13\,600$</tex-math></inline-formula> buses, as well as on other difficult test cases. Furthermore, scalability is assessed by showing that, unlike in the centralized computation, the distributed implementation of the proposed adaptive method is independent of system size.
Query Answering in Description Logics with Transitive Roles

We study the computational complexity of conjunctive query answering w.r. t. ontologies formulated in fragments of the description logic SHIQ. Our main result is the identification of two new sources of complexity: the combination of transitive roles and role hierarchies which results in 2-EXPTIME-hardness, and transitive roles alone which result in CO-NEXPTIME-hardness. These bounds complement the existing result that inverse roles make query answering in SHIQ 2-EXPTIME-hard. We also show that conjunctive query answering with transitive roles, but without inverse roles and role hierarchies, remains in EXPTIME if the ABox is tree-shaped.
Vulnerabilities and Limitations of MQTT Protocol Used between IoT Devices

With the proliferation of smart devices capable of communicating over a network using different protocols, each year more and more successful attacks are recorded against these, underlining the necessity of developing and implementing mechanisms to protect against such attacks. This paper will review some existing solutions used to secure a communication channel, such as Transport Layer Security or symmetric encryption, as well as provide a novel approach to achieving confidentiality and integrity of messages. The method, called Value-to-Keyed-Hash Message Authentication Code (Value-to-HMAC) mapping, uses signatures to send messages, instead of encryption, by implementing a Keyed-Hash Message Authentication Code generation algorithm. Although robust solutions exist that can be used to secure the communication between devices, this paper considers that not every Internet of Things (IoT) device or network design is able to afford the overhead and drop in performance, or even support such protocols. Therefore, the Value-to-HMAC method was designed to maximize performance while ensuring the messages are only readable by the intended node. The experimental procedure demonstrates how the method will achieve better performance than a symmetric-key encryption algorithm, while ensuring the confidentiality and integrity of information through the use of one mechanism.
Agnesi weighting for the measure problem of cosmology

The measure problem of cosmology is how to assign normalized probabilities to observations in a universe so large that it may have many observations occurring at many different spacetime locations. I have previously shown how the Boltzmann brain problem (that observations arising from thermal or quantum fluctuations may dominate over ordinary observations if the universe expands sufficiently and/or lasts long enough) may be ameliorated by volume averaging, but that still leaves problems if the universe lasts too long. Here a solution is proposed for that residual problem by a simple weighting factor 1/(1+t2) to make the time integral convergent. The resulting Agnesi measure appears to avoid problems other measures may have with vacua of zero or negative cosmological constant.
Cubic and tetragonal Ce3+ ions in strontium fluoride

Optical absorption spectra in the vacuum ultraviolet region and high resolution emission and absorption spectra in the ultraviolet region for cubic and tetragonal Ce3+ centres in SrF2 crystals were measured. Cubic centres are characterized by a 33 250 cm−1 zero-phonon line and a sharp phonon line spaced from the zero-phonon line by 410 cm−1. The decay times of cubic and tetragonal centre luminescences are 32 ns. Comparison of cubic and tetragonal spectra allows us to establish the influence of charge compensating interstitial fluorine ions on f and d levels of Ce3+ ions. Non-empirical Hartree–Fock calculations for Ce states in molecular clusters of alkaline-earth fluorides were performed. To make the calculated transitions coincide with the experimental ones one needs to take into account a shift of Ce3+ and interstitial F− towards each other by 10% of the initial distance.
Performance Analysis of Hydrofoil Shaped and Bi-Directional Diffusers for Cross Flow Tidal Turbines in Single and Double-Rotor Configurations

With the aim of finding efficient solutions for cross flow turbine (CFT) bi-directional diffusers able to harvest non perfectly rectilinear tidal currents, a 2D CFD analysis of ducted CFTs was carried out with focus on the effects of diffuser shape and yaw angle. The HARVEST hydrofoil shaped diffuser, equipped with a pair of counter-rotating turbines, and a bi-directional symmetrical diffuser were compared in terms of coefficient of power (CP), torque ripple, overall thrust on diffuser and wake characteristics. Slightly better CP were predicted for the symmetrical diffuser, due to the convergent walls that address the flow towards the blade with a greater attack angle during early and late upwind and to the viscous interactions between the turbine wakes and strong vortices shed by the diffuser. A CP’s extraordinary improving resulted when yaw increased up to 22.5° for the hydrofoil shaped and up to 30° for the symmetrical diffuser. Similar behaviour in yawed flows also occurred in case of a ducted single rotor, demonstrating that it is a characteristic of CFTs. The insertion of a straight throat in the diffuser design proved to be an effective way to mitigate torque ripple, but a CP loss is expected.
Phenomenology of U(1)Lμ−Lτ charged dark matter at PAMELA/FERMI and colliders

Recent data on e+/e− and p̄ cosmic rays suggest that dark matter annihilate into the standard model (SM) particles through new leptophilic interaction. In this paper, we consider a standard model extension with the gauged U(1)Lμ−Lτ group, with a new Dirac fermion charged under this U(1) as a dark matter. We study the muon (g−2)μ, thermal relic density of the cold dark matter, and the collider signatures of this model. Z′ productions at the Tevatron or the LHC could be easily order of O(1)−O(103) fb.
SANS investigations of the flux line lattice in unconventional superconductors

Small-angle neutron scattering has been used to study the flux line lattice (FLL) in the \(d\)-wave superconductors YBa\(_2\)Cu\(_3\)O\(_7\) and CeCoIn\(_5\). Our studies on the High-\(T_c\) superconductor YBa\(_2\)Cu\(_3\)O\(_7\) were carried out using a twin-free sample, and we present the first observations of the intrinsic FLL structure in this material, with a magnetic field applied parallel to the crystal c-axis (H || c). We observe a sequence of field-driven FLL structure transitions, the detailed physics of which can be broadly described in terms of field-induced non-locality, the potency of which is perhaps increased by the anisotropy of the order-parameter. The heavy-fermion superconductor CeCoIn\(_5\) exhibits an exotic ground state that combines unconventional superconductivity with strong paramagnetism. With H || c, these properties contribute towards both a rich FLL structure phase diagram, and new behaviour of the FLL form factor. Most notably, we observe the form factor to increase with field, in strong contrast to the monotonic decrease expected from predictions made using more conventional theories. These results can be qualitatively described by calculations made within the framework of the quasiclassical Eilenberger theory, which indicate the increase in the form factor as due to field-induced Pauli paramagnetic effects which manifest most strongly within the flux line cores.