Aeration is one of the most important methods to keep stored grain safe and maintain its quality. Experimental platforms are used for stored grain aeration study in a laboratory-scale. The purpose of ...this paper was to provide the real-time data acquisition and control system design of a new experimental platform with multifunction for stored grain study. Requirements of the aeration experiments were analyzed, and multi running modes were designed. The aeration inlet air conditions were designed to be adjustable and multi variables need to be controlled simultaneously, which was a key problem to be solved for the platform. An ON/OFF-PID based multivariable cooperative control method was proposed, and two control loops were formed where inlet air temperature and humidity were considered separately while could be controlled simultaneously with a logic judgement strategy. Real-time data needed to be monitored was acquired with different sensors and displayed intuitively. Experiments were carried out to test the static and dynamic characteristics of the control method and three inlet air flow rates of 0.03, 0.08 and 0.13 m·s−1were used. Performance of the data acquisition system was also tested. The results showed that, the inlet air conditions control error was within ±1 °C and 10% for temperature and relative humidity, respectively. The real-time data acquisition of multi parameters during aeration process was realized. The experimental platform can be used for studies of different aeration objectives.
North China registers frequent air pollution episodes from high PM2.5 concentrations. Shijiazhuang is located at the intensive industrial zone of this region, but there is insufficient data on the ...chemical composition of PM2.5 and its sources in this city. In this study, the chemical and seasonal characteristics of PM2.5 in Shijiazhuang were investigated based on 12-h integrated PM2.5 measurements made over eight 1-month periods in each season between June 2014 and April 2016 (486 samples). The eight-season average concentration of PM2.5 was 138.8 μg m−3, and the major chemical components were secondary inorganic aerosol (SIA) species of sulfate, nitrate, and ammonium (41.5%), followed by organic matter (25.9%). The mass concentration and most of the chemical components of PM2.5 showed clear seasonal variation, with a winter-high and summer-low pattern. SO42− and NO3− were the dominant components at each pollution level in summer and autumn (18.1%–30.6% and 14.2%–27.0%, respectively). Sufficient gaseous oxidants (O3) concentrations and suitable meteorology conditions were observed in these two seasons. Highest SOR (0.61), SO42−/EC(10.8) and NOR (0.58), NO3−/EC (5.9) were found in summer and autumn, which indicated intense secondary transformation in these two seasons. Organic matter was the dominant species in winter, which increased from 17.1 μg m−3 for clean days (28.7% of PM2.5) to 169.1 μg m−3 (38.4% of PM2.5). The accumulation of primary emissions (coal combustion and biomass burning) was responsible for the increasing OM trend (especially for POC). The highest and leading proportion of mineral dust occurred in spring (20.3%–46.5%) as a result of higher wind speeds (up to 3 m/s). Potential source contribution function (PSCF) analyses implied that the border areas of Hebei, Henan and Shandong Provinces, together with the central area of Shanxi Province, contributed significantly to the PM2.5 pollution in Shijiazhuang, especially in autumn and winter.
Major components (SO42−, NO3−, primary organic carbon (POC), secondary organic carbon (SOC) and mineral dusts) of PM2.5, SOR and NOR at different pollution level of each season.
C: Clean days; SL: Slightly polluted days; MP: Moderately polluted days; HP: Heavily polluted days; SEP: Severely polluted days. Display omitted
•SIA and OM were the major components of PM2.5 in Shijiazhuang.•High atmospheric oxidation was conducive to form SIA in summer and autumn.•Biomass burning and coal combustion contributed to the high OM in autumn and winter.•Regional transportation contributed significantly to the PM2.5 pollution in Shijiazhuang.
To better understand the characteristics of the chemical compositions of aerosols comprised of water soluble ions (WSIs) and carbonaceous aerosol (CA) and their impacts on the visibility throughout ...the North China Plain (NCP), four experimental sampling campaigns were carried out between June 2013 and May 2014. The sampling sites were located in Beijing, Xiangshan, Tianjin, Shijiazhuang, and Qinhuangdao. The air pollution episodes mainly occurred during the autumn and winter in the NCP. With regard to different particle size distributions, the ratio of anions to cations in the fine size (0.64) was greater than that in the coarse size (0.54) in the NCP. Coefficients of divergence indicate that aerosol pollution had similar characteristics in the five cities of the NCP and that the pollutants were characterized by mutual influences and regional transfer processes. There were different non-linear correlations between the visibility and mass concentrations of PM2.5 at different relative humidity (RH) conditions. When the RH was >70%, the visibility was <5km; this shows that, due to hygroscopic growth in a higher RH, the increase in PM2.1 resulted in a decrease in the visibility. The Interagency Monitoring of Protected Visual Environments (IMPROVE) method was used to estimate the light extinction coefficients (LEC) from the measured concentrations of chemical species. Organic matter (OM), ammonium nitrate (AN), and ammonium sulfate (AS) were the three dominant species that contributed to the LEC in Beijing and had the highest proportions of total contributions to the LEC in the summer, accounting for 32.2%, 25.9%, and 24.4%, respectively. The LEC of sea salts did not change much throughout the year and accounted for 4.1–5.3% in Beijing and 4.8–7.4% in Tianjin. According to the Ambient Air Quality Standard, the days were divided into pollutional days (PD) and attained days (AD). The increasing concentrations of AN, AS and OM resulted in an increase in the LEC in the NCP, which led to the occurrences of low visibility events during the autumn and winter. NH4+, NO3−, and SO42− mainly existed as fine size particles (diameter<2.1μm) in Beijing (73.5%, 80.7%, and 78.0% on PD and 63.3%, 79.4%, and 72.5% on AD, respectively) and Tianjin (81.0%, 80.6%, and 82.1% on PD and 71.5%, 44.3%, and 69.7% on AD, respectively). However, the CA originating mainly from fuel combustion also played an important part in the visibility impairment in the coarse size (2.1<diameter<9.0μm). According to a positive matrix factorization (PMF) model, 37.1% and 26.5% of the LEC came from secondary aerosols on PD in Beijing and in Tianjin, respectively. In addition, biomass burning, fuel combustion and fugitive dust were also important contributing sources of the LEC in the NCP.
Average mass size distribution of NH4+, NO3−, SO42−, OC, EC and SOC, their mass ratio of PD to AD within different size ranges, and size-segregated LEC fraction of AN, AS, OM and EC in winter in BJ. Display omitted
•The low visibility events mainly happened in the North China Plain during the autumn or winter.•The visibility and PM2.1 present non-linear correlations in different relative humidity conditions.•Organic matter, NH4NO3, and (NH4)2SO4 were the main light extinction factors in Beijing.•37.1% and 26.5% of the light extinction coefficients came from secondary aerosols on Pollutional Days in Beijing and Tianjin.
Due to atmospheric scattering, solar radiation, and other factors, the Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2) product data suffer from a substantial amount of background noise. This ...poses a significant challenge when attempting to directly utilize the raw data. Consequently, data denoising becomes an indispensable preprocessing step for its subsequent applications, such as the extraction of forest structure parameters and ground elevation data. While the Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise (DBSCAN) algorithm is currently the most widely used method, it remains susceptible to complexities arising from terrain, low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and input parameter variations. This paper proposes an efficient Multi-Level Auto-Adaptive Noise Filter (MLANF) algorithm based on photon spatial density. Its purpose is to extract signal photons from ICESat-2 terrestrial data of different ground cover types. The algorithm follows a two-step process. Firstly, random noise photons are removed from the upper and lower regions of the signal photons through a coarse denoising process. Secondly, in the fine denoising step, the K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) algorithm selects the K photons to calculate the slope along the track. The calculated slope is then used to rotate the direction of the searching neighborhood in the DBSCAN algorithm. The proposed algorithm was tested in eight datasets of four surface types: forest, grassland, desert, and urban, and the extraction results were compared with those from the ATL08 datasets and the DBSCAN algorithm. Based on the ground-truth signal photons obtained by visual inspection, the classification precision, recall, and F-score of our algorithm, as well as two other algorithms, were calculated. The MLANF could achieve a good balance between classification precision (97.48% averaged) and recall (97.96% averaged). Its F-score (97.69% averaged) was higher than that of the other two methods. This demonstrates that the MLANF algorithm successfully obtained a continuous surface profile from ICESat-2 datasets with different surface cover types, significant topographic relief, and low SNR.
The rise of comics and games has led to increased artistic processing of portrait photos. With growing commercial demand and advancements in deep learning, neural networks for rapid facial style ...transfer have become a key research area in computer vision. This involves converting face photos into different styles while preserving content. Face images are more complex than regular images, requiring extensive modification. However, current methods often face issues such as unnatural color transitions, loss of detail in highlighted areas, and noticeable artifacts along edges, resulting in low-quality stylized images. In this study, an enhanced generative adversarial network (GAN) is proposed, which is based on Adaptive Layer Instance Normalization (AdaLIN) + Laplacian. This approach incorporates the AdaLIN normalization method, allowing for the dynamic adjustment of Instance Normalization (IN) and Layer Normalization (LN) parameters’ weights during training. By combining the strengths of both normalization techniques, the model selectively preserves and alters content information to some extent, aiming to strike a balance between style and content. This helps address problems such as unnatural color transitions and loss of details in highlights that lead to color inconsistencies. Furthermore, the introduction of a Laplacian regularization term aids in denoising the image, preventing noise features from interfering with the color transfer process. This regularization also helps reduce color artifacts along the face’s edges caused by noise while maintaining the image’s contour information. These enhancements significantly enhance the quality of the generated face images. To compare our method with traditional CycleGAN and recent algorithms such as XGAN and CariGAN, both subjective and objective evaluations were conducted. Subjectively, our method demonstrates more natural color transitions and superior artifact elimination, achieving higher scores in Mean Opinion Score (MOS) evaluations. Objectively, experiments using our method yielded better scores across three metrics: FID, SSIM, and MS-SSIM. The effectiveness of the proposed methods is validated through both objective and subjective evaluations.
Due to the increasing number of international exchanges, foreign users have gradually become a significant consumer segment. Many of them are not proficient in the local language. Providing them with ...native language services will be an important trend, both from a business and a humanistic perspective. The purpose of this study is to investigate the fast-food restaurant ordering system that can provide multilingual services for foreigners, and to investigate factors that influence fast food restaurant consumers to adopt multilingual self-service ordering systems. Based on the characteristics of foreign users, we have proposed experience factors such as convenience, translation quality, social anxiety, and the Flow. According to research, the convenience of the service has a strong direct impact on consumers' intention to use, social anxiety has a weak direct impact on consumers' intention to use, and translation quality has a weak direct impact on consumers' intention to use through the intermediate variable of social anxiety. Particularly, Flow experience is not associated with intention to use. The Flow state is one in which users are completely immersed and do not notice time or the surroundings when the perceived difficulty of a task matches their abilities. The purpose of this study is to improve our understanding of the customer evaluation criteria for multilingual self-service systems, as well as to establish the MSSS model for future research on multilingual self-service systems.
Glass transition plays a critical role to determine the dynamic behaviors of amorphous shape memory polymers (SMPs). However, the fundamental relationships between shape memory effect (SME) and ...dynamic glass transition have not been well understood, even though this topic has been studied for decades. In this study, we apply a mean-square displacement function of Adam-Gibbs (AG) domain size model to explore metastable glass transition between normal glass state and rubbery state of amorphous SMPs, based on both mode-coupling theory and mean-field model. A statistic viscosity equation is formulated to study the dynamic glass transition of metastable AG domains in an amorphous SMP. A dynamically spinodal model is also developed to connect dynamic glass transitions to thermomechanical processes, based on statistic viscosity equation and phase transition model. Furthermore, using the spinodal models, multiple shape memory behaviors have been predicted for amorphous SMPs with dual-, triple- and quadruple-SMEs, resulted from their different routes of themomechanical evolutions. Finally, the proposed models are verified using the experimental data reported in literature.
As a neurodegenerative disease, Alzheimer’s disease (AD) seriously affects the health of older people. Changes in synapses occur first over the course of the disease, perhaps even before the ...formation of Aβ plaques. Histone deacetylase (HDAC) mediates the damage of Aβ oligomers to dendritic spines. Therefore, we examined the relationship between HDAC activity and synaptic defects using an HDAC inhibitor (HDACI), BG45, in the human neuroblastoma SH-SY5Y cell line with stable overexpression of Swedish mutant APP (APPsw) and in APP/PS1 transgenic mice during this study. The cells were treated with 15 μM BG45 and the APP/PS1 mice were treated with 30 mg/kg BG45. We detected the levels of synapse-related proteins, HDACs, tau phosphorylation, and amino-3-hydroxy-5-methyl-4-isoxazolepropionic acid (AMPA) receptors using Western blotting and immunohistochemistry. We also measured the expression of cytoskeletal proteins in the cell model. The mRNA levels of the glutamate ion receptor alginate subunit 2 (GRIK2), sodium voltage-gated channel beta subunit (SCN3B), synaptophysin (SYP), Grm2 (the gene encoding glutamate receptor subunit 2 (GluR2)), Grid2IP, glutamate receptor interacting protein 1 (GRIP1), and GRIP2 were detected to explore the effects of the HDACI on regulating the expression of synaptic proteins and AMPA receptors. According to our studies, the expressions of HDAC1, HDAC2, and HDAC3 were increased, which were accompanied by the downregulation of the synapse-related proteins SYP, postsynaptic dendritic protein (PSD-95), and spinophilin as early as 24 h after transfection with the APPsw gene. BG45 upregulated the expression of synapse-related proteins and repaired cytoskeletal damage. In vivo, BG45 alleviated the apoptosis-mediated loss of hippocampal neurons, upregulated synapse-related proteins, reduced Aβ deposition and phosphorylation of tau, and increased the levels of the synapse-related genes GRIK2, SCN3B, SYP, Grm2, and Grid2IP. BG45 increased the expression of the AMPA receptor subunits GluA1, GluA2, and GluA3 on APPsw-transfected cells and increased GRIP1 and GRIP2 expression and AMPA receptor phosphorylation in vivo. Based on these results, HDACs are involved in the early process of synaptic defects in AD models, and BG45 may rescue synaptic damage and the loss of hippocampal neurons by specifically inhibiting HDAC1, HDAC2, and HDAC3, thereby modulating AMPA receptor transduction, increasing synapse-related gene expression, and finally enhancing the function of excitatory synapses. BG45 may be considered a potential drug for the treatment of early AD in further studies.
•AsA, one kind of ROS scavenger, is a low-cost, safe, and convenient preservative.•AsA treatment could help to retain better quality of longan fruit during storage.•AsA treatment reduced weight loss ...of fresh longan fruit.•AsA treatment retarded disease development and pericarp browning of fresh longans.•AsA showed a great potential application for postharvest fresh longan fruit.
The impacts of reactive oxygen species (ROS) scavenger ascorbic acid (AsA) treatment on the storability and quality attributes of ‘Fuyan’ longan fruit were explored. Compared to control samples, the treatment of 4 g L−1 AsA solution clearly reduced fruit weight loss, indexes of fruit disease and pericarp browning, retained higher percentage of commercially acceptable fruit, higher values of chromaticity a∗, chromaticity b∗, and chromaticity L∗, delayed pigment degradation in longan pericarp, and retarded the decreases of nutritive ingredients in longan pulp. When stored for 6 d, vitamin C (0.08 g kg−1), sucrose (20.70 g kg−1), total soluble sugar (56.32 g kg−1), and total soluble solids (12.4%) in AsA-treated fruit displayed the clearly higher contents than those in control samples. These data suggested that the treatment of exogenous ROS scavenger AsA could effectively enhance the quality attributes and storability of postharvest longan fruit, thereby lengthen their postharvest shelf-life.
Primary breast lymphoma (PBL) is a rare malignant breast tumor. The literature concerning PBL ultrasound is based primarily on case reports, with only a few cases reported to date.
This study aimed ...to elucidate the sonographic characteristics of PBL and explore the value of ultrasonography in the preoperative diagnosis of PBL using the Breast Imaging Reporting and Data System (BI-RADS).
A retrospective review of files involving a diagnosis of PBL (2013-2020) was conducted in the Department of Pathology, Zhejiang Provincial People's Hospital, Hangzhou, and the First Affiliated Hospital of Wenzhou Medical University, Wenzhou. The clinical characteristics and sonographic features of 12 lesions in 10 patients were analyzed and discussed in light of the literature.
All patients, aged 50.40 ± 14.31 years (range 30-66 years), had clinically palpable lumps. Most cases were on the right breast and were unilateral. Only one patient had mucosa-associated lymphoma. The histological type of the other patients was diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL). Ultrasonography revealed nodular and diffuse PBL lesions without internal calcification. The nodular PBL was hypoechoic or mixed hypo- to hyperechoic, with a differential lobulated shape and horizontal growth. Although color Doppler flow imaging (CDFI) showed no significant features, the ultrasound findings were categorized as BI-RADS 4 in 10 of the 12 lesions and BI-RADS 5 in two lesions. All patients were suspected of having malignancies (BI-RADS 4 or 5).
PBL was mostly found in middle-aged and elderly women, and the right breast was more prone to the development of malignancies. PBL lesions were classified as either nodular or diffuse based on the boundaries of the tumors in the ultrasound images. Typical PBL was characterized by hypoechoic or heterogeneous lesions with circumscribed or microlobulated margins and horizontal growth. The sonographic features of the PBL lesions and the BI-RADS categorizations of the lesions analyzed suggested malignancy.
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