Low-temperature preparation of tailored carbon nanostructures in water

The development of low-temperature carbonization procedures promises to provide novel nanostructured carbon materials that are of high current interest in materials science and technology. Here, we report a "wet-chemical" carbonization method that utilizes hexayne amphiphiles as metastable carbon precursors. Nearly perfect control of the nanoscopic morphology was achieved by self-assembly of the precursors into colloidal aggregates with tailored diameter in water. Subsequent carbonization furnished carbon nanocapsules with a carbon microstructure resembling graphite-like amorphous carbon materials.     

Issues in the scaling of exothermic reactions: From micro-scale to macro-scale

Micro-reactors are characterized by systems in which at least one dimension is of the order of a few hundred microns. These systems have a high surface area to volume ratio and hence can loose heat effectively to the ambient. This feature renders them as preferable for conducting exothermic reactions which can exhibit runaway behavior. In this work we study the oxidation of 2-octanol using nitric acid as a typical representative system of an exothermic competitive-consecutive reaction system.A dimensionless analysis of the governing equations is carried out under realistic assumptions and two dimensionless numbers Re and Da are identified which determine the system behavior. We analyze two situations (1) Thermally developing flow and (2) Thermally developed flow. We show that both Re and Da cannot be maintained similar for a micro-system and a macro-system. It is shown that, Da a dimensionless residence time is more important and must be maintained similar between two systems to obtain similar conversions. We also show that when Da is same in two systems whose dimensions are different by three orders of magnitude, the temperature rise in the micro-system is lower than that in the macro-system. Under these conditions the micro-reactor is preferred as it can help us avoid runaway behavior. When the Re is maintained the same in the two systems we see that the micro-reactor shows no significant conversion and there is no appreciable temperature rise in it. When the effect of axial dispersion is included the performance of the micro-system is not affected as compared to that of the macro-system, when Da is matched.     

Comprehensive Collection and Prediction of ABC Transmembrane Protein Structures in the AI Era of Structural Biology

The number of unique transmembrane (TM) protein structures doubled in the last four years, which can be attributed to the revolution of cryo-electron microscopy. In addition, AlphaFold2 (AF2) also provided a large number of predicted structures with high quality. However, if a specific protein family is the subject of a study, collecting the structures of the family members is highly challenging in spite of existing general and protein domain-specific databases. Here, we demonstrate this and assess the applicability and usability of automatic collection and presentation of protein structures via the ABC protein superfamily. Our pipeline identifies and classifies transmembrane ABC protein structures using the PFAM search and also aims to determine their conformational states based on special geometric measures, conftors. Since the AlphaFold database contains structure predictions only for single polypeptide chains, we performed AF2-Multimer predictions for human ABC half transporters functioning as dimers. Our AF2 predictions warn of possibly ambiguous interpretation of some biochemical data regarding interaction partners and call for further experiments and experimental structure determination. We made our predicted ABC protein structures available through a web application, and we joined the 3D-Beacons Network to reach the broader scientific community through platforms such as PDBe-KB.     

Reducing the impact of false time out on TCP performance in TCP over OBS networks

Random burst contention losses plague the performance of Optical Burst Switched networks. Such random losses occur even in low load network condition due to the analogous behavior of wavelength and routing algorithms. Since a burst may carry many packets from many TCP sources, its loss can trick the TCP sources to conclude/infer that the underlying (optical) network is congested. Accordingly, TCP reduces sending rate and switches over to either fast retransmission or slow start state. This reaction by TCP is uncalled-for in TCP over OBS networks as the optical network may not be congested during such random burst contention losses. Hence, these losses are to be addressed in order to improve the performance of TCP over OBS networks. Existing work in the literature achieves the above laid objective at the cost of violating the semantics of OBS and/or TCP. Several other works make delay inducing assumptions. In our work, we introduce a new layer, called Adaptation Layer, in between TCP and OBS layers. This layer uses burst retransmission to mitigate the effect of burst loss due to contention on TCP by leveraging the difference between round trip times of TCP and OBS. We achieve our objective with the added advantage of maintaining the semantics of the layers intact.     

Analysis and computation of the oil film thickness between the piston ring and cylinder liner of an internal combustion engine

A study of the essential features of piston rings in the cylinder liner of an internal combustion engine reveals that the lubrication problem posed by it is basically that of a slider bearing. According to steady-flow-hydrodynamics, viz. the oil film thickness becomes zero at the dead centre positions as the velocity, U = 0. In practice, however, such a phenomenon cannot be supported by consideration of the wear rates of pistion rings and cylinder liners. This can be explained by including the “squeeze” action term in the hydrodynamic theory, viz. .This article introduces the equations of the above theory along with the viscosity variation over the piston stroke length; the piston ring profile is assumed as a double parabola with a central straight portion.The results of this analysis as applied to internal combustion engines are presented and compared with other earlier analysis.     

Improved Shuffled Frog-Leaping Algorithm Based QoS Constrained Multicast Routing for Vanets

Prompt and reliable communication between vehicular nodes are essential as its limited coverage and dynamic mobility rate introduces frequent change of network topology. The key feature of vehicular communication that establishes direct connectivity or Road Side Unit-based data transfer among vehicular nodes is responsible for sharing emergency information during critical situations. Multicast routing data dissemination among vehicular nodes is considered to be the potential method of parallel data transfer as they facilitate the option of determining an optimal multicast tree from feasible number of multicast trees established between the source and destinations. This estimation of optimal multicast tree using meta-heuristic techniques is confirmed to improve the throughput and reliability of the network when QoS-based constraints are imposed during multicast routing. An Improved Shuffled Frog-Leaping Algorithm-Based QoS Constrained Multicast Routing (ISFLABMR) is proposed for estimating an optimal multicast tree that confirms effective multi-constrained applied multicast routing between vehicular nodes. ISFLABMR minimizes the cost of transmission to 22% by reducing the number of multicast clusters formed during multicasting through the utilization of local and global-based optimizations. The simulation results of ISFLABMR proveits predominant reduction rate of 24% and 21% in average packet latency and energy consumptions incurred under multicast routing.     

Virtual Source Based Multicast Routing in WDM Optical Networks

Wavelength-division multiplexed (WDM) networks using wavelength-routing are considered to be potential candidates for the next generation wide-area backbone networks. Multicasting is the ability to transmit information from a single source node to multiple destination nodes and is becoming an important requirement in high-speed networks. As WDM technology matures and multicast applications become increasingly popular, supporting multicast routing at the WDM layer becomes an important and yet a challenging topic. This paper concerns with the problem of optical multicast routing in WDM networks. A few nodes in the network may have wavelength conversion and/or splitting capabilities. In this paper, a new multicast tree construction algorithm is proposed. This algorithm is based on a concept called virtual source. A virtual source is a node having both the splitting and wavelength conversion capabilities. By exploiting the presence of virtual source nodes, the proposed algorithm achieves improved performance. To further improve the performance, the algorithm assigns priorities to nodes based on their capabilities. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is verified through extensive simulation experiments.     

Heat conduction in heterogeneous materials and irregular boundaries II: A simple and fast algorithm for massively parallel computer

In an earlier paper [1], a simple model for investigating heat conduction in materials of irregular shapes having heterogeneous thermal conductivity was presented. In this method, referred to as the Effective Parameter for Interfacial cells (dubbed as EPIC) [2], the material is tessellated into cells (square or cubes), a cell with non-uniform thermal conductivity inside it is replaced by a cell with an effective uniform conductivity, and the heat conduction equation is then solved numerically by discretizing in time and space. The implementation of EPIC on a massively parallel SIMD machine (MasParMP-1) is described. Sample results are shown for 2-D and 3-D materials.     

A systems approach to validating the water vision of the Aral Sea Basin

Abstract:

The governments of the Aral Sea Basin countries, in cooperation with international organizations (UNESCO and World Bank) came up with a “water vision “for the region until 2025. The landlocked Aral Sea has been suffering from an imbalance in water evaporation, and, water inflow from its two main sources — Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers, when the planners in the former Soviet Union from the 1960s diverted the river waters for irrigation. The irrigated area has increased from the 1960s by two‐thirds to 7 million hectares and the population by three‐fold to 50 million in the basin countries. Consequently the inflow to the Aral Sea from these two rivers decreased from 55 km³ in 1960 to a few km³ during the 1980s and 1990s. This has resulted in one of the worst man‐made ecological disasters of the century. In this paper, we examine different scenarios to achieve the vision goals and whether it is indeed feasible. Using IWMI basin‐oriented water accounting principles, we have shown that significant amount of water is being wasted in the region. Our analysis concludes that though not all the vision goals are likely to be met over the next 25 years, the inflow into the Aral Sea can be increased to over 20 km³ through better management and use of water resources.