516 research outputs found
Synthesis of encapsulated ZnO nanowires provide low impedance alternatives for microelectrodes
Microelectrodes are commonly used in electrochemical analysis and biological sensing applications owing to their miniaturised dimensions. It is often desirable to improve the performance of microelectrodes by reducing their electrochemical impedance for increasing the signal-to-noise of the recorded signals. One successful route is to incorporate nanomaterials directly onto microelectrodes; however, it is essential that these fabrication routes are simple and repeatable. In this article, we demonstrate how to synthesise metal encapsulated ZnO nanowires (Cr/Au-ZnO NWs, Ti-ZnO NWs and Pt-ZnO NWs) to reduce the impedance of the microelectrodes. Electrochemical impedance modelling and characterisation of Cr/Au-ZnO NWs, Ti-ZnO NWs and Pt-ZnO NWs are carried out in conjunction with controls of planar Cr/Au and pristine ZnO NWs. It was found that the ZnO NW microelectrodes that were encapsulated with a 10 nm thin layer of Ti or Pt demonstrated the lowest electrochemical impedance of 400 ± 25 kΩ at 1 kHz. The Ti and Pt encapsulated ZnO NWs have the potential to offer an alternative microelectrode modality that could be attractive to electrochemical and biological sensing applications
Proceedings of ASME Turbo Expo 2013: Power for Land, Sea and Air, Volume 1A: Combustion, Fuels and Emissions
Shahrokh Etemad (with Sandeep Alavandi and Benjamin Baird) is a contributing author, Fuel Flexible Rich Catalytic Lean Burn System for Low Btu Fuels
Acute Ethanol Administration Rapidly Increases Phosphorylation of Conventional Protein Kinase C in Specific Mammalian Brain Regions in Vivo
Background
Protein kinase C (PKC) is a family of isoenzymes that regulate a variety of functions in the central nervous system including neurotransmitter release, ion channel activity, and cell differentiation. Growing evidence suggests that specific isoforms of PKC influence a variety of behavioral, biochemical, and physiological effects of ethanol in mammals. The purpose of this study was to determine whether acute ethanol exposure alters phosphorylation of conventional PKC isoforms at a threonine 674 (p-cPKC) site in the hydrophobic domain of the kinase, which is required for its catalytic activity.
Methods
Male rats were administered a dose range of ethanol (0, 0.5, 1, or 2 g/kg, intragastric) and brain tissue was removed 10 minutes later for evaluation of changes in p-cPKC expression using immunohistochemistry and Western blot methods.
Results
Immunohistochemical data show that the highest dose of ethanol (2 g/kg) rapidly increases p-cPKC immunoreactivity specifically in the nucleus accumbens (core and shell), lateral septum, and hippocampus (CA3 and dentate gyrus). Western blot analysis further showed that ethanol (2 g/kg) increased p-cPKC expression in the P2 membrane fraction of tissue from the nucleus accumbens and hippocampus. Although p-cPKC was expressed in numerous other brain regions, including the caudate nucleus, amygdala, and cortex, no changes were observed in response to acute ethanol. Total PKC? immunoreactivity was surveyed throughout the brain and showed no change following acute ethanol injection
Characterizing collagen mimetic peptides for orthogonal self-assembly
A computational design of collagen mimetic peptides (CMPs) that self-assemble orthogonally (mutually exclusively), in the presence of other pre-existing collagen trimer mixtures, in vitro, has been proposed. The orthogonality in self-assembly was brought about by orthogonal patterning of ionic salt bridges and residues, along the collagen trimers’ axial length. Through the aid of circular dichroism spectroscopy alone, a novel experimental protocol was set-up to rapidly assess the level of cross-talk that may arise in such designed ‘heterogeneous monomer to trimer folding’ mixture environments. It is shown that the designed collagen mimetic peptides are stable and hetero-specific within their composite 3 chain peptide ecosystem. We experimentally demonstrate the extent to which loss in specificity could possibly occur, upon moving to a higher order ‘more than 3 monomers in solution’ peptide ensemble. Although the desired level of multi-state orthogonality was not achieved in the current design, the experimental results obtained were used to estimate the stability and specificity barrier threshold that one might run into, if one were to instead design orthogonal systems where-in specificity is incorporated during the computational design stage itself a priori. A Pareto frontier plot indicating the specificity versus stability trade-off is plotted. We conclude that a bottom-up design approach, incorporating design of specificity during the sequence design stage, would be a better way forward for achieving self-assembling orthogonality. In contrast to the complex chaperone assisted protein folding systems existing in nature, our method is a simplistic first step towards the complementary approach of modular synthetic collagen molecule design.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical referencesby Sandeep Vishwanath Belur
Resin and steel-reinforced resin used as injection materials in bolted connections
Injection bolts are bolts in which the cavity produced by the clearance between the bolt and the wall of the hole is completely filled up with a two-component resin. Filling of the clearance is carried out through a small hole in the head of the bolt. After injection and complete curing, the connection is slip resistant. Recently the injection material, typically an epoxy resin, was modified at TU Delft by adding steel shots (spherical particles) to mitigate the effects of resin compliance in the shear connection of reusable composite (steel-concrete) structures. Experimental compressive material tests on unconfined/confined resin and steel-reinforced resin are evaluated in this chapter. The uniaxial model which combines damage mechanics and the Ramberg-Osgood relationship is proposed to describe the uniaxial compressive behavior of resin and steel-reinforced resin. First-order numerical homogenization is employed as a high-fidelity model, where a combined nonlinear isotropic/kinematic cyclic hardening model is employed to define the steel plasticity, the linear Drucker-Prager plastic criterion was used to simulate resin damage, and the cohesive surfaces reflecting the relationship between traction and displacement at the interface. The linear Drucker-Prager plastic model is used as a low-fidelity model.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Steel & Composite Structure
Anomaly-Based DNN Model for Intrusion Detection in IoT and Model Explanation: Explainable Artificial Intelligence
IoT has gained immense popularity recently with advancements in technologies and big data. IoT network is dynamically increasing with the addition of devices, and the big data is generated within the network, making the network vulnerable to attacks. Thus, network security is essential, and an intrusion detection system is needed. In this paper, we proposed a deep learning-based model for detecting intrusions or attacks in IoT networks. We constructed a DNN model, applied a filter method for feature reduction, and tuned the model with different parameters. We also compared the performance of DNN with other machine learning techniques in terms of accuracy, and the proposed DNN model with weight decay of 0.0001 and dropout rate of 0.01 achieved an accuracy of 0.993, and the reduced loss on the NSL-KDD dataset having five classes. DL models are a black box and hard to understand, so we explained the model predictions using LIME.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Cyber Securit
UMBC at SemEval-2018 Task 8: Understanding Text about Malware
Proceedings of International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2018)We describe the systems developed by the UMBC team for 2018 SemEval Task 8, SecureNLP (Semantic Extraction from CybersecUrity REports using Natural Language Processing). We participated in three of the sub-tasks: (1) classifying sentences as being relevant or irrelevant to malware, (2) predicting token labels for sentences, and (4) predicting attribute labels from the Malware Attribute Enumeration and Characterization vocabulary for defining malware characteristics. We achieved F1 scores of 50.34/18.0 (dev/test), 22.23 (test-data), and 31.98 (test-data) for Task1, Task2 and Task2 respectively. We also make our cybersecurity embeddings publicly available at https://bit.ly/cybr2vec.The research described in this paper was partially supported by gifts from IBM and Northrop Grumman. We thank Agniva Banerjee, Sudip Mittal, Sandeep Narayanan, Maithilee Prabodh, Vishal Rathod, and Arya Renjan for helping with annotations.https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/S18-1142
A 0.7 V, Ultra-Wideband Common Gate LNA with Feedback Body Bias Topology for Wireless Applications
An ultra-wideband (UWB) low noise amplifier (LNA) for 3.3⁻13.0 GHz wireless applications using 90 nm CMOS is proposed in this paper. The proposed LNA uses an improved common-gate (CG) topology utilizing feedback body biasing (FBB), which improves noise figure (NF) by a considerable amount. Parallel-series tuned LC network was used between the common-gate first stage and the cascoded common-source (CS) stage to achieve the maximum signal flow from CG to CS stage. Improved CS topology with a series inductor at the drain terminal in the second stage connected and cascoded CS third stage provides high power gain (S21) and bandwidth enhancement throughout the complete UWB. A common-drain buffer stage at the output provides high output reflection coefficient (S22). It achieves an average power gain (S21) of 14.7 ± 0.5 dB with a noise figure (NF) of 3.0⁻3.7 dB. It has an input reflection coefficient (S11) less than −11.7 dB for 3.3⁻13.0 GHz frequency and output reflection coefficient (S22) of less than −10.6 dB with a very high reversion isolation (S12) of less than −72.4 dB. It consumes only 5.2 mW from a 0.7 V power supply
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