Strength improvement in silty clay by microbial-induced calcite precipitation

Bulletin of Engineering Geology and the Environment - The application of MICP (microbial-induced calcite precipitation) to clays has been restricted due to their low permeability and small pore...     

Effect of ZnO layer thickness upon optoelectrical properties of NiO/ ZnO heterojunction prepared at room temperature

In this work, p-NiO/n-ZnO heterostructures were successfully prepared at room temperature using RF sputtering technique. The influence of ZnO layer thickness on the performance of the heterojunction was investigated. The deposited ZnO layers have a hexagonal Wurtzite structure with preferable growth orientations along (002) and (103) for thinner films. Increasing the thickness results in more crystallographic orientation randomness. The current–voltage measurements of the realized heterojunctions showed a clear rectifying behavior. The measured ideality factor varies from 2.5 to 1.6 according to the thickness of ZnO layer. The series resistance of the device is enlarged with increasing ZnO thickness. The deduced parameters from the I–V characteristics suggest that 200 nm is the optimal thickness of the ZnO layer according to our experimental conditions. We attribute the relatively better performance of this thickness to achieving reasonable compensation between serial resistance and ideality factor. The best heterojunction was tested and successfully used as a UV detector.     

Ceramics based on calcium phosphates substituted with magnesium ions for bone regeneration

In this study, chemical precipitation methods were used to obtain ceramic materials doped with magnesium ions in order to improve the regeneration properties of materials used for tissue engineering. Two different ratios of magnesium oxide were used to dope the ceramic powder, more precisely 5% and 10%. The synthesized materials were characterized to determine the calcination temperature of the precursor powder by means of thermal analysis; to determine the mineralogical composition, X-ray diffraction was employed and the scanning electron microscopy was used to determine the microstructure. To make use of these ceramics as biomaterials, viability and proliferation cell tests have been performed. Since synthetic materials have several limitations with regard to medical applications, the materials based on HAp substituted with Mg ions are a promising solution for the regeneration of bone defects because they have a similar bone structure. The presence of Mg in the material proves to be beneficial because this element plays an important role in bone cell regeneration, and more specifically, in stimulating osteoblast proliferation. The materials synthesized in this work present a suitable morphology for uses in bone regeneration because they offer to cells a friendly environment for growth and anchoring.     

Preparation of Docosahexaenoic Acid-Rich Diacylglycerol-Rich Oil by Lipase-Catalyzed Glycerolysis of Microbial Oil from Schizochytrium sp. in a Solvent-Free System

Docosahexaenoic acid (DHA)-rich diacylglycerol (DAG)-rich oil was prepared by lipase-catalyzed glycerolysis of microbial oil from Schizochytrium sp. in a solvent-free system. The reaction parameters including lipase type, substrate molar ratio, temperature, lipase concentration, and reaction time were screened. The selected conditions were determined as follows: Novozym® 435 (Novozymes A/S, Bagsvaerd, Denmark) as biocatalyst at 8 wt%, substrate ratio (DHA-rich microbial TAG/glycerol) of 1:1 mol/mol, temperature of 50 °C, and reaction time of 12 hours. Under these conditions, the triacylglycerol (TAG), DAG, and monoacylglycerol (MAG) contents in the product were 36.4%, 48.2%, and 15.4%, respectively. The lipase was reused successively for 18 cycles without significant loss of activity under the conditions given above. Fatty acid composition analysis of the final product showed that the contents of DHA in TAG, DAG, and MAG were 53.9%, 44.9%, and 34.8%, respectively. DHA-rich DAG has the potential to be used as an ingredient in infant formula to increase the bioavailability of DHA.     

Analysis of the Single-Crystalline Silicon Photovoltaic (PV) Module Performances Under Low γ - Radiation from Radioactive Source

The present paper is about an experimental evaluation of the terrestrial silicon single-crystalline solar PV module behavior under low gamma radiation. The     

A Feature Selection Strategy to Optimize Retinal Vasculature Segmentation

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a complication of diabetes mellitus that appears in the retina. Clinitians use retina images to detect DR pathological signs related to the occlusion of tiny blood vessels. Such occlusion brings a degenerative cycle between the breaking off and the new generation of thinner and weaker blood vessels. This research aims to develop a suitable retinal vasculature segmentation method for improving retinal screening procedures by means of computer-aided diagnosis systems. The blood vessel segmentation methodology relies on an effective feature selection based on Sequential Forward Selection, using the error rate of a decision tree classifier in the evaluation function. Subsequently, the classification process is performed by three alternative approaches: artificial neural networks, decision trees and support vector machines. The proposed methodology is validated on three publicly accessible datasets and a private one provided by Hospital Sant Joan of Reus. In all cases we obtain an average accuracy above 96% with a sensitivity of 72% in the blood vessel segmentation process. Compared with the state-of-the-art, our approach achieves the same performance as other methods that need more computational power. Our method significantly reduces the number of features used in the segmentation process from 20 to 5 dimensions. The implementation of the three classifiers confirmed that the five selected features have a good effectiveness, independently of the classification algorithm.