The Rational Use of Water Resources in the Strategy of Industry 4.0

The article substantiates that the transformation of the world economy associated with Industry 4.0 leads to a significant change in the way resources are used and affects the possibility of implementing the concept of sustainable development. In this regard, a combined analysis of the concept of new industrial development and the concept of sustainable development, as well as an assessment of the current practice of their implementation is required. In this paper, such an analysis was carried out on the example of water resources management. The paper proposes a methodology for assessing the correlation of water management and industrial development levels of regions. This includes the use of both traditional statistical approaches to the analysis of the level of development of economic systems, and elements of data mining. The neural network is constructed in order to estimate the forecasted values of the water intensity of the gross regional product when the indicators of the level of industrial development of the regions change. The results show that the most significant indicators for changing water intensity include advanced production technologies used, the share of value-added to high-tech industries, and innovative activities of organisations.

     

Hydrogen and ethanol: Production,storage, and transportation

The present paper provides insights into the feasibility of using hydrogen and bioethanol blends as energy carriers in the foreseeable future upon discussions on the advantages and the disadvantages. The comprehensive overviews on the production, storage, and transportation of hydrogen and bioethanol have been made; and the current problems and potential solutions for the three stages have been summarized. Finally, the prospections on hydrogen and bioethanol could be expect optimistically.     

Fabrication of an electrolyte-supported protonic ceramic fuel cell with nano-sized powders of Ni-composite anode

Composite anodes of nano-sized Ni and Ba(Zr_0.85Y_0.15)O_3-δ (BZY) were fabricated by infiltrating a single precursor solution of BZY and Ni into the BZY scaffold, and decreasing the calcination temperature to 1173 K. This decrease in the fabrication temperature of the Ni-cermet anode prevents the chemical reaction between the electrolyte and nickel, thus preventing a reduction in the conductivity of the electrolyte. By optimizing the amount of Ni in the Ni-cermet and infiltrating additional catalysts such as CeO₂ and Pd, the non-ohmic ASR of the Ni-cermet anode could be optimized. This resulted in a smaller non-ohmic ASR of anode than one that was fabricated by the conventional co-sintering method. Consequently, a high power density of 790 mW/cm² at 973 K can be obtained from electrolyte-supported cells.     

Efficient fault diagnosis method of PEMFC thermal management system for various current densities

The temperature of a fuel cell has a considerable impact on the saturation of a membrane, electrochemical reaction speed, and durability. So thermal management is considered one of the critical issues in polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells. Therefore, the reliability of the thermal management system is also crucial for the performance and durability of a fuel cell system. In this work, a methodology for component-level fault diagnosis of polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell thermal management system for various current densities is proposed. Specifically, this study suggests fault diagnosis using limited data, based on an experimental approach. Normal and five component-level fault states are diagnosed with a support vector machine model using temperature, pressure, and fan control signal data. The effects of training data at different operating current densities on fault diagnosis are analyzed. The effects of data preprocessing method are investigated, and the cause of misdiagnosis is analyzed. On this basis, diagnosis results show that the proposed methodology can realize efficient component-level fault diagnosis using limited data. The diagnosis accuracy is over 92% when the residual basis scaling method is used, and data at the highest operating current density is used to train the support vector machine.     

Metagenomic analysis revealed the individualized shift in ileal microbiome of neonatal calves in response to delaying the first colostrum feeding

The aim of this study was to explore the effect of colostrum feeding time on the ileal microbiome of neonatal calves. In this study, 22 male Holstein calves were randomly assigned to different colostrum feeding time treatments: after birth (at 45 min, n = 7); at 6 h after birth (n = 8); and at 12 h after birth (TRT12h; n = 7). At 51 h after birth, calves were killed and ileum digesta was collected for microbiome analysis using shotgun metagenomic sequencing. Bacteria, archaea, eukaryotes, and viruses were identified from the ileum microbiome. For the bacteriome, Firmicutes and Proteobacteria were the predominant phyla, and Escherichia, Streptococcus, Lactobacillus were the 3 most abundant genera. For the archaeal community, Euryarchaeota and Crenarchaeota were the 2 major phyla, and Methanosarcina, Methanobrevibacter, and Methanocorpusculum were the 3 most abundant genera. In total, 116 Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathways were identified from the ileal microbiome, with “biosynthesis of vancomycin group antibiotics,” “biosynthesis of ansamycins,” “valine, leucine, and isoleucine biosynthesis,” “ribosome,” and “d-alanine metabolism” as the top 5 functions. When the ileal microbiomes were compared among the 3 treatments, the relative abundance of Enterococcus was higher in TRT12h calves, suggesting that calves may have a higher abundance of opportunistic pathogens when the feeding of colostrum is delayed for 12 h. Moreover, among all KEGG pathways, the enriched “taurine and hypotaurine metabolism” (KO00430) pathway was identified in the ileal microbiome of TRT12h calves; however, future studies are needed to understand the effect on the host. Additionally, 2 distinct ileal microbial profiles were identified across all samples, indicating that that host factors may play a significant role in driving varied microbiome changes in response to colostrum feeding time. Whether such microbiome shifts affect long-term gut function and calf performance warrants future studies.     

Study on the friction interface evolution during rotary friction welding of tube

In this study, evolution characteristics of the friction interface during rotary friction welding of tube were investigated. The friction interface that obtained at different welding stage were observed by confocal laser scanning microscopy. The results show that the friction interface transforms from sliding friction state to visco-plastic deformation state when the welding torque reaches the peak value. In addition, based on the thermodynamic framework extracted from the maximum entropy production principle, an analytical model for transition criterion from sliding friction to visco-plastic deformation was established. The model was verified by the corresponding experimental results of eight alloys, which indicated that the accuracy and generality of the model is satisfactory.     

Dansameum regulates hepatic lipogenesis and inflammation in vitro and in vivo

Food Science and Biotechnology - Although the clinical guidelines for nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) therapy recommended hepato-protection and exercise to reduce body weight, no...     

Experimental investigations and constitutive modeling of cyclic interface shearing between HDPE geomembrane and sandy gravel

This paper presents the results of experimental investigations and constitutive modeling of cyclic interface shearing between HDPE geomembrane and cohesionless sandy gravel. A series of cyclic interface shear tests was performed using a large-scale cyclic shear apparatus with servo controlled system. Particular attention was paid to the influences of the amount of shear-displacement amplitude, number of cycles, shear rate and the normal pressure on the mechanical response. The experimental results show that the path of the shear stress against the cyclic shear displacement is strongly non-linear and forms a closed hysteresis loop, which is pressure dependent, but almost independent of the shear rate. For small shear-displacement amplitudes, the obtained damping ratio is significantly greater than zero, which is different to the behavior usually observed for cyclic soil to soil shearing. In order to describe the pressure dependency of the hysteresis loop using a single set of constitutive parameters, new approximation functions are put forward and embedded into the concept of the Masing rule. Further, a new empirical function is proposed for the damping ratios to capture the experimental data for both small and large cyclic shear-displacement amplitudes. The included model parameters are easy to calibrate and the new functions may also be useful in developing enhanced constitutive models for the simulation of the cyclic interface shear behavior between other geosynthetics and soils.