Abstract: This study demonstrates the use of Class F fly ash in
combination with lime or lime kiln dust in the full depth reclamation
(FDR) of asphalt pavements. FDR, in the context of this paper, is a
process of pulverizing a predetermined amount of flexible pavement
that is structurally deficient, blending it with chemical additives and
water, and compacting it in place to construct a new stabilized base
course. Test sections of two structurally deficient asphalt pavements
were reclaimed using Class F fly ash in combination with lime and
lime kiln dust. In addition, control sections were constructed using
cement, cement and emulsion, lime kiln dust and emulsion, and mill
and fill. The service performance and structural behavior of the FDR
pavement test sections were monitored to determine how the fly ash
sections compared to other more traditional pavement rehabilitation
techniques. Service performance and structural behavior were
determined with the use of sensors embedded in the road and Falling
Weight Deflectometer (FWD) tests. Monitoring results of the FWD
tests conducted up to 2 years after reclamation show that the cement,
fly ash+LKD, and fly ash+lime sections exhibited two year resilient
modulus values comparable to open graded cement stabilized
aggregates (more than 750 ksi). The cement treatment resulted in a
significant increase in resilient modulus within 3 weeks of
construction and beyond this curing time, the stiffness increase was
slow. On the other hand, the fly ash+LKD and fly ash+lime test
sections indicated slower shorter-term increase in stiffness. The fly
ash+LKD and fly ash+lime section average resilient modulus values
at two years after construction were in excess of 800 ksi. Additional
longer-term testing data will be available from ongoing pavement
performance and environmental condition data collection at the two
pavement sites.
Abstract: One problem of synthetic sunflower cultivation is an
erratic germination of the seeds. To improve the germination, presowing
seed treatment with an ultrasound was tested. All treatments
were carried out at 40 kHz frequency with the intensities of 40, 60,
80 and 100% of the ultrasonic generator total power (250 W) for the
durations of 5, 10, 15 and 20 minutes. Data on seed germination
percentage, seed vigor index (SVI), root and shoot lengths of
seedlings were collected. The results showed that germination, SVI,
root and shoot lengths of ultrasonic treated seedlings were different
from the control, depending on intensity of the ultrasound. The
effects of ultrasonic treatment were significant on germination,
resulting in a maximum increase of 43% at 40 and 60% intensities
compared to that of the control seeds. In addition, seedlings of these 2
treatments had higher SVI and longer root and shoot lengths than that
of the control seedlings. All treatment durations resulted in higher
germination and SVI, longer root and higher shoot lenghts of
seedlings than the control. Among the duration treatments, only SVI
and seedling root length were significantly different.
Abstract: As nanotechnology advances, the use of nanotechnology for medical purposes in the field of nanomedicine seems more promising; the rise of nanorobots for medical diagnostics and treatments could be arriving in the near future. This study proposes a swarm intelligence based control mechanism for swarm nanorobots that operate as artificial platelets to search for wounds. The canonical particle swarm optimization algorithm is employed in this study. A simulation in the circulatory system is constructed and used for demonstrating the movement of nanorobots with essential characteristics to examine the performance of proposed control mechanism. The effects of three nanorobot capabilities including their perception range, maximum velocity and respond time are investigated. The results show that canonical particle swarm optimization can be used to control the early version nanorobots with simple behaviors and actions.
Abstract: The present models and simulation algorithms of intracellular stochastic kinetics are usually based on the premise that diffusion is so fast that the concentrations of all the involved species are homogeneous in space. However, recents experimental measurements of intracellular diffusion constants indicate that the assumption of a homogeneous well-stirred cytosol is not necessarily valid even for small prokaryotic cells. In this work a mathematical treatment of diffusion that can be incorporated in a stochastic algorithm simulating the dynamics of a reaction-diffusion system is presented. The movement of a molecule A from a region i to a region j of the space is represented as a first order reaction Ai k- ! Aj , where the rate constant k depends on the diffusion coefficient. The diffusion coefficients are modeled as function of the local concentration of the solutes, their intrinsic viscosities, their frictional coefficients and the temperature of the system. The stochastic time evolution of the system is given by the occurrence of diffusion events and chemical reaction events. At each time step an event (reaction or diffusion) is selected from a probability distribution of waiting times determined by the intrinsic reaction kinetics and diffusion dynamics. To demonstrate the method the simulation results of the reaction-diffusion system of chaperoneassisted protein folding in cytoplasm are shown.
Abstract: Sputum smear conversion after one month of antituberculosis
therapy in new smear positive pulmonary tuberculosis
patients (PTB+) is a vital indicator towards treatment success. The
objective of this study is to determine the rate of sputum smear
conversion in new PTB+ patients after one month under treatment of
National Institute of Diseases of the Chest and Hospital (NIDCH).
Analysis of sputum smear conversion was done by re-clinical
examination with sputum smear microscopic test after one month.
Socio-demographic and hematological parameters were evaluated to
perceive the correlation with the disease status. Among all enrolled
patients only 33.33% were available for follow up diagnosis and of
them only 42.86% patients turned to smear negative. Probably this
consequence is due to non-coherence to the proper disease
management. 66.67% and 78.78% patients reported low haemoglobin
and packed cell volume level respectively whereas 80% and 93.33%
patients accounted accelerated platelet count and erythrocyte
sedimentation rate correspondingly.
Abstract: The coalescer process is one of the methods for oily water treatment by increasing the oil droplet size in order to enhance the separating velocity and thus effective separation. However, the presence of surfactants in an oily emulsion can limit the obtained mechanisms due to the small oil size related with stabilized emulsion. In this regard, the purpose of this research is to improve the efficiency of the coalescer process for treating the stabilized emulsion. The effects of bed types, bed height, liquid flow rate and stage coalescer (step-bed) on the treatment efficiencies in term of COD values were studied. Note that the treatment efficiency obtained experimentally was estimated by using the COD values and oil droplet size distribution. The study has shown that the plastic media has more effective to attach with oil particles than the stainless one due to their hydrophobic properties. Furthermore, the suitable bed height (3.5 cm) and step bed (3.5 cm with 2 steps) were necessary in order to well obtain the coalescer performance. The application of step bed coalescer process in reactor has provided the higher treatment efficiencies in term of COD removal than those obtained with classical process. The proposed model for predicting the area under curve and thus treatment efficiency, based on the single collector efficiency (ηT) and the attachment efficiency (α), provides relatively a good coincidence between the experimental and predicted values of treatment efficiencies in this study.
Abstract: Decentralized eco-sanitation system is a promising and sustainable mode comparing to the century-old centralized conventional sanitation system. The decentralized concept relies on an environmentally and economically sound management of water, nutrient and energy fluxes. Source-separation systems for urban waste management collect different solid waste and wastewater streams separately to facilitate the recovery of valuable resources from wastewater (energy, nutrients). A resource recovery centre constituted for 20,000 people will act as the functional unit for the treatment of urban waste of a high-density population community, like Singapore. The decentralized system includes urine treatment, faeces and food waste co-digestion, and horticultural waste and organic fraction of municipal solid waste treatment in composting plants. A design model is developed to estimate the input and output in terms of materials and energy. The inputs of urine (yellow water, YW) and faeces (brown water, BW) are calculated by considering the daily mean production of urine and faeces by humans and the water consumption of no-mix vacuum toilet (0.2 and 1 L flushing water for urine and faeces, respectively). The food waste (FW) production is estimated to be 150 g wet weight/person/day. The YW is collected and discharged by gravity into tank. It was found that two days are required for urine hydrolysis and struvite precipitation. The maximum nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) recovery are 150-266 kg/day and 20-70 kg/day, respectively. In contrast, BW and FW are mixed for co-digestion in a thermophilic acidification tank and later a decentralized/centralized methanogenic reactor is used for biogas production. It is determined that 6.16-15.67 m3/h methane is produced which is equivalent to 0.07-0.19 kWh/ca/day. The digestion residues are treated with horticultural waste and organic fraction of municipal waste in co-composting plants.
Abstract: Quantitative measurements of tumor in general and tumor volume in particular, become more realistic with the use of Magnetic Resonance imaging, especially when the tumor morphological changes become irregular and difficult to assess by clinical examination. However, tumor volume estimation strongly depends on the image segmentation, which is fuzzy by nature. In this paper a fuzzy approach is presented for tumor volume segmentation based on the fuzzy connectedness algorithm. The fuzzy affinity matrix resulting from segmentation is then used to estimate a fuzzy volume based on a certainty parameter, an Alpha Cut, defined by the user. The proposed method was shown to highly affect treatment decisions. A statistical analysis was performed in this study to validate the results based on a manual method for volume estimation and the importance of using the Alpha Cut is further explained.
Abstract: Prostate cancer is one of the most frequent cancers in men and is a major cause of mortality in the most of countries. In many diagnostic and treatment procedures for prostate disease accurate detection of prostate boundaries in transrectal ultrasound (TRUS) images is required. This is a challenging and difficult task due to weak prostate boundaries, speckle noise and the short range of gray levels. In this paper a novel method for automatic prostate segmentation in TRUS images is presented. This method involves preprocessing (edge preserving noise reduction and smoothing) and prostate segmentation. The speckle reduction has been achieved by using stick filter and top-hat transform has been implemented for smoothing. A feed forward neural network and local binary pattern together have been use to find a point inside prostate object. Finally the boundary of prostate is extracted by the inside point and an active contour algorithm. A numbers of experiments are conducted to validate this method and results showed that this new algorithm extracted the prostate boundary with MSE less than 4.6% relative to boundary provided manually by physicians.
Abstract: The peculiarities of the nanoscale structure-phase
states formed after electroexplosive carburizing and subsequent
electron-beam treatment of technically pure titanium surface in different regimes are established by methods of transmission electron
diffraction microscopy and physical mechanisms are discussed. Electroexplosive carburizing leads to surface layer formation
(40 m thickness) with increased (in 3.5 times) microhardness. It consists of β-titanium, graphite (monocrystals 100-150 nm,
polycrystals 5-10 nm, amorphous particles 3-5nm), TiC (5-10 nm), β-Ti02 (2-20nm). After electron-beam treatment additionally increasing the microhardness the surface layer consists of TiC.
Abstract: Today, cancer remains one of the major diseases that
lead to death. The main obstacle in chemotherapy as a main cancer
treatment is the toxicity to normal cells due to Multidrug Resistance
(MDR) after the use of anticancer drugs. Proposed solution to
overcome this problem is the use of MDR efflux inhibitor of cinchona
alkaloids which is delivered together with anticancer drugs
encapsulated in the form of polymeric nanoparticles. The particles
were prepared by the hydration method. The characterization of
nanoparticles was particle size, zeta potential, entrapment efficiency
and in vitro drug release. Combination nanoparticle size ranged 29-45
nm with a neutral surface charge. Entrapment efficiency was above
87% for the use quinine, quinidine or cinchonidine in combination
with etoposide. The release test results exhibited that the cinchona
alkaloids release released faster than that of etoposide. Collectively,
cinchona alkaloids can be packaged along with etoposide in
nanomicelles for better cancer therapy.
Abstract: During this day a considerable amount of Leachate is produced with high amounts of organic material and nutrients needed plants. This study has done in order to scrutinize the effect of Leachate compost on the pH, EC and organic matter percentage in the form of statistical Factorial plan through randomizing block design with three main and two minor treatments and also three replications during three six month periods. Major treatments include N: Irrigation with the region-s well water as a control, I: Frequent irrigation with well water and Leachate, C: Mixing Leachate and water well (25 percent leachate + 75 percent ordinary well water) and secondary treatments, include DI: surface drip irrigation and SDI: sub surface drip irrigation. Results of this study indicated significant differences between treatments and also there were mixing up with the control treatment in the reduction of pH, increasing soluble salts and also increasing the organic matter percentage. This increase is proportional to the amount of added Leachate and in the treatment also proportional to higher mixture of frequent treatment. Therefore, since creating an acidic pH increases the ability to absorb some nutrient elements such as phosphorus, iron, zinc, copper and manganese are increased and the other hand, organic materials also improve many physical and chemical properties of soil are used in Leachate trash Consider health issues as refined in the green belts around cities as a liquid fertilizer recommended.
Abstract: The effects of enzyme action and heat pretreatment on oil extraction yield from sunflower kernels were analysed using hexane extraction with Soxhlet, and aqueous extraction with incubator shaker. Ground kernels of raw and heat treated kernels, each with and without Viscozyme treatment were used. Microscopic images of the kernels were taken to analyse the visible effects of each treatment on the cotyledon cell structure of the kernels. Heat pretreated kernels before both extraction processes produced enhanced oil extraction yields than the control, with steam explosion the most efficient. In hexane extraction, applying a combination of steam explosion and Viscozyme treatments to the kernels before the extraction gave the maximum oil extractable in 1 hour; while for aqueous extraction, raw kernels treated with Viscozyme gave the highest oil extraction yield. Remarkable cotyledon cell disruption was evident in kernels treated with Viscozyme; whereas steam explosion and conventional heat treated kernels had similar effects.
Abstract: Intravitreal injection (IVI) is the most common treatment for eye posterior segment diseases such as endopthalmitis, retinitis, age-related macular degeneration, diabetic retinopathy, uveitis, and retinal detachment. Most of the drugs used to treat vitreoretinal diseases, have a narrow concentration range in which they are effective, and may be toxic at higher concentrations. Therefore, it is critical to know the drug distribution within the eye following intravitreal injection. Having knowledge of drug distribution, ophthalmologists can decide on drug injection frequency while minimizing damage to tissues. The goal of this study was to develop a computer model to predict intraocular concentrations and pharmacokinetics of intravitreally injected drugs. A finite volume model was created to predict distribution of two drugs with different physiochemical properties in the rabbit eye. The model parameters were obtained from literature review. To validate this numeric model, the in vivo data of spatial concentration profile from the lens to the retina were compared with the numeric data. The difference was less than 5% between the numerical and experimental data. This validation provides strong support for the numerical methodology and associated assumptions of the current study.