Studies have revealed that rheological characteristics and self‐weight stress are nonnegligible during a consolidation process, especially for land reclamation projects or dredged soils. However, ...they are rarely considered simultaneously in traditional consolidation theories. This paper presents a general solution to the consolidation system of rheological soils that incorporates a fractional derivative model and self‐weight stress. First, the theory of the fractional derivative is introduced to the Merchant model to describe the consolidation behaviours of rheological soils, and the self‐weight stress of soils is simultaneously considered. Based on this model, the governing equation of a rheological consolidation system that considers self‐weight stress is obtained. Second, the analytical solutions of the effective stress and settlement in the Laplace domain are obtained by applying the Laplace transform to the consolidation governing equation. Further, the actual solutions in the real domain are obtained by a numerical Laplace transform inversion method (Abate's fixed Talbot method). Finally, the reliability and correctness of the consolidation theories and the proposed solutions are verified by comparing the calculated results with the degenerate solutions and experimental results in the existing literature. Furthermore, parametric studies are conducted to investigate the influence of rheological parameters and self‐weight parameters on the consolidation settlement and consolidation rate.
Drug-resistant bacteria are a serious threat to global public health. Gram-positive bacterial endolysin preparations have been successfully used to fight Gram-positive bacteria as a novel ...antimicrobial replacement strategy. However, Gram-negative bacterial phage endolysins cannot be applied directly to destroy Gram-negative strains due to the externally inaccessible peptidoglycan layer of the cell wall; this has seriously hampered the development of endolysin-like antibiotics against Gram-negative bacteria. In this study, 3–12 hydrophobic amino acids were successively added to the C-terminus of
Escherichia coli
phage endolysin Lysep3 to create five different hydrophobic-modified endolysins. Compared with endogenous Lysep3, endolysins modified with hydrophobic amino acids surprisingly could kill
E. coli
from outside of the cell at the appropriate pH and endolysin concentration. The lysis ability of modified endolysins were enhanced with increasing numbers of hydrophobic amino acids at the C-terminus of endolysin. Thus, these findings demonstrate that the enhancement of hydrophobicity at the C-terminus enables the endolysin to act upon
E. coli
from the outside, representing a novel method of lysing Gram-negative antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
In 2011, a novel watery diarrhoea in 1–7day-old piglets occurred in Changchun, China, characterized by high pathogenicity and mortality. Investigation of clinical signs, examination for viruses, and ...isolation and identification of bacteria showed that co-infection by Clostridium perfringens type A and Escherichia coli (K88, 987P) was the most likely cause of the disease. Newborn piglets challenged with a mixture of Clostridium perfringens type A and Escherichia coli (K88, 987P) died within 3days with clinical signs and gross lesions similar to those in the piglets that died in the outbreak.
A subsequent study showed that the use in sows of an inactivated vaccine against the two causal bacteria was effective at reducing the incidence of the watery diarrhoea in piglets. Piglets from sows given the inactivated vaccine had a incidence of watery diarrhoea of 8% (14/175), much lower than the 95% (192/201) seen in piglets from control sows. This is the first report of diarrhoea in piglets resulting from co-infection of Clostridium perfringens type A and Escherichia coli (K88, 987P). Further studies are required to better understand the pathogenesis of this disease.
As a multiple-candidate output format of speech recognition system, word lattice is essential for applications such as keyword spotting, confidence measure, multi-pass decoding and so on. This paper ...analyzes the problems of generating word lattice using Weighted Finite-State Transducer (WFST) decoders, such as word boundary decision, word position pushing and redundancy existed in the word lattice. We present an efficient word lattice generation method which is able to retain all the accurate word alignment information. Furthermore, a new word-level determinization algorithm that keeps the alignment information is described to completely remove the redundant paths in the word lattice. Experiments show that the proposed determinization algorithm is effective for improving the quality of the word lattice-based confidence measure and accuracy of keyword spotting.
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