Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Effects of Posture and Technique on Forces Experienced When Hanging Continuous Miner Cable

Analysis of lost-time back injuries in underground coal mines indicates that handling continuous miner cable places workers at high risk of injury. Manual hanging of this type of cable is a common lifting task in underground mines. This study was performed to assess the ground reaction forces associated with hanging cable in various postures and employing different methods of securing the cable. Seven experienced coal miners (mean age: 41.4 years ± 2.1) performed a series of 12 cable hanging tasks. Independent variables included a set of six posture/vertical space constraint conditions (LIFTCOND), and two techniques of securing the cable to the ceiling (METHOD). The dependent variables consisted of ground reaction forces measured using two force plates. LIFTCOND (F 5.66 = 21.31, p < 0.0001) and METHOD (F 1,66 = 10.89, p < 0.005) both significantly affected the magnitude of the peak resultant forces generated during the tasks. Post hoc analysis indicated that kneeling postures resulted in significantly lower forces than stooping for the same ceiling heights. Greater forces were associated with higher lifting conditions, attributable in part to the fact that higher lifts require more cable to be hoisted. Forces were also increased when subjects twisted baling wire to secure the cable, as compared to hanging it on a hook. An interaction between LIFTCOND and METHOD was identified with lateral shear forces - stooping conditions where the subjects twisted the cable with wire resulted in higher lateral shear forces. Results of this study will be used to develop recommendations to reduce back injury risk when handling cable.
Antiviral Activity of the Rhamnolipids Mixture from the Antarctic Bacterium Pseudomonas gessardii M15 against Herpes Simplex Viruses and Coronaviruses

Emerging and re-emerging viruses represent a serious threat to human health at a global level. In particular, enveloped viruses are one of the main causes of viral outbreaks, as recently demonstrated by SARS-CoV-2. An effective strategy to counteract these viruses could be to target the envelope by using surface-active compounds. Rhamnolipids (RLs) are microbial biosurfactants displaying a wide range of bioactivities, such as antibacterial, antifungal and antibiofilm, among others. Being of microbial origin, they are environmentally-friendly, biodegradable, and less toxic than synthetic surfactants. In this work, we explored the antiviral activity of the rhamnolipids mixture (M15RL) produced by the Antarctic bacteria Pseudomonas gessardii M15 against viruses belonging to Coronaviridae and Herpesviridae families. In addition, we investigated the rhamnolipids’ mode of action and the possibility of inactivating viruses on treated surfaces. Our results show complete inactivation of HSV-1 and HSV-2 by M15RLs at 6 µg/mL, and of HCoV-229E and SARS-CoV-2 at 25 and 50 µg/mL, respectively. Concerning activity against HCoV-OC43, 80% inhibition of cytopathic effect was recorded, while no activity against naked Poliovirus Type 1 (PV-1) was detectable, suggesting that the antiviral action is mainly directed towards the envelope. In conclusion, we report a significant activity of M15RL against enveloped viruses and demonstrated for the first time the antiviral effect of rhamnolipids against SARS-CoV-2.
Improving a Vaned Diffuser for a Given Centrifugal Impeller by 3D Inverse Design

In this paper the application of 3D inverse design code TURBOdesign−1 to the design of the vane geometry of a centrifugal compressor vaned diffuser is presented. For this study the new diffuser is designed to match the flow leaving the conventional impeller, which is highly non-uniform. The inverse method designs the blade geometry for a given specification of thickness and blade loading distribution. The paper describes the choice of loading distribution used in the design as well as the influence of the diffuser inlet flow distribution on the vane geometry and flow field. The flow field in the new diffuser is analysed by a 3D viscous flow code and the result is compared to that of the conventional diffuser. Finally the results of testing the stage performance of the new diffuser is compared with that of the conventional stage.Copyright © 2002 by ASME
Estimation of transient thermal impedance for constant current of a power thyristor using temperature field calculation

Transient thermal impedance for constant current is calculated by dividing the overtemperature of a given spot within a silicon pellet by power losses. The calculation of the temperature field in the silicon pellet is based on the assumption that losses are produced in the silicon pellet only. Calculated results for one power thyristor are compared to its catalog values. The best agreement was obtained in the case of uniform loss distribution throughout the silicon pellet volume, with the temperature at the r/2 spot in the central silicon pellet plane being taken as virtual junction temperature. Understandably, the best agreement obtained was for a temperature at the r/2 spot in silicon pellet's central plane, since the catalog curve is based on the measurement of forward voltage drop which is dependent on total temperature field in a silicon pellet. The difference between calculated transient thermal impedance curve for constant current and its catalog curve in the entire time area is, in this case, for cooling from the anode side, from the cathode side, and from both sides, 11.4, 10.3, and 3.6%, respectively. >
Adaptive Positioning Control of Servomotor Based on Model Identification

The new energy vehicle industry needs a large number of vehicle power batteries, and its production depends on high-speed and high-precision battery pole-piece cutting equipment, which is mainly composed of the electrode material roll uncoiling unit, buffering unit, main drive unit, and cutting unit. Due to the nonlinearity and high-speed intermittent motion mode of a servomotor, the existing control technology is difficult to apply to the cutting system. This article presents a multimotor linear velocity planning approach used to ensure synchronous and cooperative operation of the motors in the cutting system. To achieve fast and accurate positioning control of the main drive motor running in fast acceleration and deceleration, periodic and intermittent mode, an adaptive position controller based on data-driven modeling technique is proposed, which makes the parameters of the controller change with the operation state of the main drive motor so that the controller can obtain good positioning accuracy in a wide working range of the main drive motor. Two linear models are established to represent the relationship between the positioning error and the positioning controller parameters and the main drive motor running conditions. The parameters of the two models are estimated offline and the parameters of the adaptive position controller can be obtained online quickly. Thus, the proposed control method for the main drive motor can be easily realized by general PLC in practical application. Simulation study results show that using the proposed method, the positioning error of the main drive motor is less than 0.1 mm when cutting 89-mm-long battery pole-piece and cutting 1 to 3 pieces/s. This result is much better than that of the position controller with fixed parameters.
PREDICTION OF MICROBIAL ACTIVITY DURING BIOSOLIDS COMPOSTING USING ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORKS

In order to determine the relationships among temperature, moisture content, and microbial activity during biosolids composting, well-controlled composting experiments were conducted using 2-factor factorial design with six temperatures (22.C, 29.C, 36.C, 43.C, 50.C, and 57.C) and five moisture contents (30%, 40%, 50%, 60%, and 70%). The microbial activity was indicated by O2 uptake rate (mg gdry matter -1 h-1) and cumulative O2 uptake (mg gdry matter -1) over time. An artificial neural network (ANN) model to predict microbial activity was developed using 8760 data patterns. After experimentation with different ANN architectures (i.e., standard backpropagation, Jordan, and Ward) and model parameter settings (i.e., data partitioning strategy, number of hidden nodes, learning rate, and momentum), the best prediction model was a combined Ward network for both O2 uptake rate and cumulative O2 uptake. An additional composting experiment at 34.C with five moisture contents was conducted, and the corresponding 1460 data patterns were used for model evaluation. The model evaluation with 34.C data showed good prediction results for both O2 uptake rate (r2 = 0.928, MAE = 0.08 mg g-1 h -1) and cumulative O2 uptake (r2 = 0.986, MAE = 5.28 mg g -1).
Physiological studies of some weeds grown under heavy metal and industrial effluent discharge zone of fertilizer factory

The present study deals with the characterization of effluent released from Brahmaputra valley Fertilizer complex, Namrup, Assam, India and distribution of heavy metals in water near to effluent discharge channel. The extent of damage caused by the effluents on physiological and biochemical properties of plants was investigated. Chlorophyll pigment, foliar protein and sugar concentration were measured in Amaranthus spinosus L. , Cassia obtusifolia L. Croton bonplandianum Baill. Leonurus sibiricus L. during the growing season and compared with control. Results indicated that effluents contained toxic elements and the observed weeds were found to be susceptible while C. bonplandianum shows tolerance to some extent. Present study suggests that although weeds are often tolerant to extreme hostile environment but some time contaminated soil threatens their normal metabolisms. This leads to some new dimensions towards further research.
Study on Technological Transfer and Innovation Network: Dynamic Capabilities of Industry Clusters

Enterprises of China's industry clusters are facing pressures to continuously supply new innovative products with increasing speed to market. Various members among the industry clusters contact with each other through technological Transfer & Innovation "spillover", which forms a technology transfer network. Numerous studies of the geographical distribution of China's cluster show that the technological Transfer and Innovation of clusters are with the nature of "Small World network". This research highlights the characteristics of clusters transfer frequency and agglomeration degree among various nodes of technology transfer network with characteristic path length and clustering coefficient. Meanwhile, this study also studies the roles and functions of different members in the technology transfer network.
Topic Modeling Revisited: A Document Graph-based Neural Network Perspective

Most topic modeling approaches are based on the bag-of-words assumption, where each word is required to be conditionally independent in the same document. As a result, both of the generative story and the topic formulation have totally ignored the semantic dependency among words, which is important for improving the semantic comprehension and model interpretability. To this end, in this paper, we revisit the task of topic modeling by transforming each document into a directed graph with word dependency as edges between word nodes, and develop a novel approach, namely Graph Neural Topic Model (GNTM). Specifically, in GNTM, a well-defined probabilistic generative story is designed to model both the graph structure and word sets with multinomial distributions on the vocabulary and word dependency edge set as the topics. Meanwhile, a Neural Variational Inference (NVI) approach is proposed to learn our model with graph neural networks to encode the document graphs. Besides, we theoretically demonstrate that Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) can be derived from GNTM as a special case with similar objective functions. Finally, extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets have clearly demonstrated the effectiveness and interpretability of GNTM compared with state-of-the-art baselines.
The smart termination: An innovative component to enable Smart Grids development

Up to now MV grid intelligence was concentrated in a few nodes, but, to enable Smart Grid's development, the presence of broadly distributed intelligence is a must; accordingly the installation of distributed measurement at several points of the MV grid is critical. In this context Enel Distribuzione and 3M have worked together on a very innovative component to retrofit existing installations: a sensored termination (called “Smart Termination” in Enel Distribuzione's specification document) for air connection switchboards, with pre-calibrated, highly accurate, passive current and voltage sensors embedded. These components have been developed to be connected to the RGDM, the Enel Distribuzione smart device installed in secondary substations for protection, automation and MV Distributed Generation management. In the first part of the paper the Enel requirements for Smart Grid devices (general functional and specific sensors requirements) are described, then the 3M product developed to meet these requirements is presented, and lastly the first sensored termination test and pilot installation results are presented. (3 pages)
Inappropriate Use of Antibiotics among Children Under Five in Rural and Urban Communities of Cambodia

Background: Inappropriate use of antibiotics is a major treat especially in low- and middle-income countries with antibiotic resistant. Cambodia with high prevalence of infectious diseases among children under five, antibiotics use in urban and rural setting has not been clearly identified. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the situation of inappropriate antibiotic use among children under five in urban and rural communities of Cambodia. Methods: An analytical cross-sectional study was carried out in both urban and rural communities in Cambodia from September to November 2020 by structured questionnaire interviewed among 512 Cambodian caregivers on antibiotic use for the under 5 children. Results: Among 512 children, majority were males both in urban ( 55.6 %) and rural (50.3%) settings, with the median age of 29.5 (3:59) months in urban and 30.0 (3:59) months in rural. The prevalence of inappropriate use of antibiotics among children under five was 79.3% (95% CI = 75.55 to 82.60), of which it was 26.0 % in urban and 53.3% in rural. Most of the rural respondents ( 82.1%) use antibiotics for bacterial infection diagnosed by doctors. However, it was only 52.6% in rural areas. Similar proportion of 58.6 % in urban and 61.1 % rural used antibiotics for fewer days than prescription. Conclusions: Inappropriate use of antibiotics were found in more than 3 quarters of children under five, of which the proportion in rural areas were much higher than urban. The further investigation on factors contributing to inappropriate use of antibiotics should be conducted.
Performance analysis of CCD cameras for industrial inspection

Developers and users of industrial inspection systems can choose from a variety of CCD- cameras with large differences in performance and price. Many industrial inspection tasks require the extraction of metric information and ever more frequently of accurate 3D metric information. The performance of CCD-cameras for metric inspection tasks is influenced by a large number of factors such as illumination, sensor characteristics, signal transmission and frame grabbing, calibration techniques, and algorithms. Recent advances in characterization and calibration of CCD-cameras are presented. Measurement accuracies exceeding 1/50th of the pixel spacing were attained with off-the-shelf equipment in controlled laboratory tests. Selection criteria of cameras as a factor of resolution and accuracy requirements are discussed.
HyperMaze: Towards Privacy-Preserving and Scalable Permissioned Blockchain

Blockchain systems face two emergent problems, namely scalability and privacy, each of which has been addressed independently. However, how to achieve privacy and scalability simultaneously remains a challenging problem for blockchains. In this article, we propose a privacy-preserving and scalable permissioned blockchain system called HyperMaze employing the zero knowledge proof technique and a hierarchical system architecture. It gains scalability by adopting a hierarchy of multiple blockchains that processes transactions in parallel. We design an ID-based dual-balance account model where an identity-based account is associated with two types of balances–a plaintext balance and a private (zero-knowledge) balance. Furthermore, we design a two-phase cross-chain transaction mechanism (2PXT) to achieve transaction privacy for both intra-chain and cross-chain transactions. We rigorously formulate a security model for HyperMaze under the universal composability framework, and then provide a simulation-based security proof. A prototype of HyperMaze is implemented and a series of experiments are conducted over up to 2,600 nodes to evaluate its performance. The experimental results show that a 4-level, (7,10)-threshold, 6-ary HyperMaze system can reach 19,440 TPS and the transaction confirmation latency is only 9.5 seconds. To our best knowledge, HyperMaze is the first high-throughput privacy-preserving blockchain whose throughput is over 19,000 TPS.
Panel: whither (or wither?) ASIC handoff?

The traditional ASIC netlist handoff is changing but to what? Is RTL handoff finally a reality? Or, will a placement-based handoff model emerge? Are differences among underlying tool technologies and methodologies only cosmetic? Or, are there fundamental business and IP distinctions? These and other questions will be discussed as the panel examines the future of the designer ASIC vendor EDA vendor relationship.
Nitrogen fertiliser replacement by single and multi-strain rhizobial inoculants for black gram, green gram and soybean cultivation in Sri Lanka

CS Hettiarachchi1*, CL Abayasekara2, P Saravana Kumar2, S Rajapakse3, SA Kulasooriya4, EMHGS Ekanayake4, RKGK Kumara4 and HMAC Gunaratne5 1 Department of Geography, Faculty of Arts,University of Peradeniya, Peradeniya. 2 Department of Botany, Faculty of Science, University of Peradeniya, Peradeniya. 3 Department of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology,University of Peradeniya, Peradeniya. 4 National Institute of Fundamental Studies, Hantana Road, Kandy. 5 Plenty Foods PLC, No 19, 3rd Lane, Rathmalana.
AN AUTOMATED TOOL FOR SINGLE- AND MULTI-OBJECTIVE OPTIMIZATION FOR DESIGNING COMBINED CYCLE GAS TURBINE POWER PLANTS

Modern optimization methods based on evolutionary algorithms and game theory are employed for the design of optimal Combined Cycle Gas Turbine Power Plants with dual-pressure heat recovery steam generators. They will be supported by computational methods for their thermal analysis and a simple model for computing their capital cost. Results will be presented for two power plants, a diesel oil fired and a natural gas fired respectively, the latter involving an additional condensate preheater. In both plants, design parameters are those related to the Heat Recovery Steam Generator.
Overview of Sandia's fiber laser program

Sandia National Laboratories' program in high-power fiber lasers has emphasized development of enabling technologies for power scaling and gaining a quantitative understanding of fundamental limits, particularly for high-peak-power, pulsed fiber sources. This paper provides an overview of the program, which includes: (1) power scaling of diffraction-limited fiber amplifiers by bend-loss-induced mode filtering to produce >1 MW peak power and >1 mJ pulse energy with a practical system architecture; (2) demonstration of a widely tunable repetition rate (7.1-27 kHz) while maintaining constant pulse duration and pulse energy, linear output polarization, diffraction-limited beam quality, and <1% pulse-energy fluctuations; (3) development of microlaser seed sources optimized for efficient energy extraction; (4) high-fidelity, three-dimensional, time-dependent modeling of fiber amplifiers, including nonlinear processes; (5) quantitative assessment of the limiting effects of four-wave mixing and self-focusing on fiber-amplifier performance; (6) nonlinear frequency conversion to efficiently generate mid-infrared through deep-ultraviolet radiation; (7) direct diode-bar pumping of a fiber laser using embedded-mirror side pumping, which provides 2.0x higher efficiency and much more compact packaging than traditional approaches employing formatted, fiber-coupled diode bars; and (8) fundamental studies of materials properties, including optical damage, photodarkening, and gamma-radiation-induced darkening.
In Vivo Imaging of Mammalian Embryos By NIR-I Photoacoustic Tomography and NIR-II Optical Coherence Tomography Using Gold Nanostars as Multifunctional Contrast Agents

Background High resolution, strong contrast and multimodality visualization of live mammalian embryo is an important requirement for studying foetal development. Photoacoustic Tomography (PAT) and Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) are two advanced imaging modalities that has been utilized for embryonic imaging. However, high contrast, multiscale and deep tissue visualization of live embryos remains challenging. Results Here, we demonstrate the use of gold nanostars (GNS) as multimodality contrast agents for the visualization and differentiation of embryos in vivo using NIR-I PAT and NIR-II OCT. We perform NIR-I PAT imaging to confirm in vivo GNS accumulation in the foetuses, and then use a customized NIR-II OCT system to further reveal deep, contrast-enhanced micro features of freshly harvested embryos. We investigate two different GNS administration pathways, i.e. intravenous and intravaginal injection, and significant enhancement of signal, image contrast, and imaging depth are achieved for both PAT and OCT. Conclusions These findings prove that PAT-OCT bi-modal imaging with GNS enhancement provides more accurate structural characteristic of live mammalian embryos, and thus reveal its potential for embryonic development visualization and early abnormality examination. These findings prove that PAT-OCT bi-modal imaging with GNS enhancement provides more accurate structural characteristic of live mammalian embryos, and thus reveal its potential for embryonic development visualization and early abnormality examination.
Evaluation of Seismic Performance of Moment Resisting Frames considering Vertical Component of Ground Motion

The design of structures to withstand seismic loading is primarily governed by horizontal ground motion, and the effects of vertical ground motion have long been deemed unimportant or secondary. However, an emerging body of evidence suggests that vertical ground motions have great destructive potential, especially for certain site conditions. Using nonlinear dynamic analyses, the seismic performance of frames is evaluated by simultaneously applying the horizontal and vertical components of earthquake motion. Three special moment frames are subjected to 15 recorded near-field earthquake motions and the results of the analyses are used for performance evaluations, based on FEMA 350 guideline. It is found that, within the elastic range of response, considering the vertical component of ground motion, does not alter the dynamic structural response significantly, however, some tangible differences emerge in nonlinear range of response once the horizontal component of ground motion is accompanied by the vertical component.