36,764 research outputs found
Special issue: Process safety in times of a pandemic
No full textGreen 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.Safety and Security Scienc
Advanced Dual-purpose Electrochemical Aptamer Sensor based Microphysiological System for Cell Culture Monitoring
No full text© 2024 Yiling YangConventional drug discovery is a lengthy and costly process with a high failure rate, mainly due to the limited human pathophysiological relevance of preclinical models used to qualify agents for clinical evaluation. As an alternative, microphysiological systems (MPS) have emerged as promising platforms for preclinical drug research, offering more relevant models of human physiology. High-frequency, real-time measurements of specific metabolite concentrations in MPS could significantly enhance the understanding of cellular metabolism and improve the application of Good Laboratory Practice (GLP) standards in cell culture protocols. However, current approaches are often constrained to single-time-point, single-parameter measurements or are limited by the range of detectable analytes. Electrochemical aptamer-based (EAB) biosensors have shown utility in real-time monitoring of analytes in vivo within blood and tissues. This study adapts an electrochemical aptamer-based (EAB) sensor to provide a more versatile, potentially multiplexable method for monitoring media composition in MPS. The research involved designing, fabricating, and optimizing EAB sensors, culminating in the development of a novel dual-purpose sensor capable of tracking both phenylalanine and pH independently of the aptamer sequence’s target analyte. This sensor was integrated into MPS platforms and validated through extensive testing in various cell cultures and tissue environments. We applied the dual-purpose EAB sensor to continuous monitoring of pH and phenylalanine in multiple in vitro cell culture settings. The miniature sensor demonstrated rapid response times, stability, high repeatability, and biologically relevant sensitivity. Additionally, we developed a leak-free reference electrode to mitigate cytotoxic effects from silver ions typically released by conventional reference electrodes. Using this dual-purpose sensor, we performed hourly measurements of pH and phenylalanine concentrations in media superfusing cultured epithelial tumor cell lines (A549, MDA-MB-231) and a human fibroblast cell line (MRC-5) for up to 72 hours.
The results demonstrated that the dual-purpose sensor achieved high sensitivity, specificity, and reliability in real-time monitoring of biomarkers within MPS. The integration of the sensor into MPS showed effective tracking of biomarker fluctuations, which might enhance the predictive accuracy of these systems for drug testing and disease modeling. Our scalable technology further supports high-throughput, multiplexed monitoring of pH and multiple analytes, broadening the metabolic qualification of microphysiological systems. This advancement represents a significant step towards more robust and informative preclinical drug testing platforms
Distributed human computation framework for linked data co-reference resolution
No full textDistributed Human Computation (DHC) is a technique used to solve computational problems by incorporating the collaborative effort of a large number of humans. It is also a solution to AI-complete problems such as natural language processing. The Semantic Web with its root in AI is envisioned to be a decentralised world-wide information space for sharing machine-readable data with minimal integration costs. There are many research problems in the Semantic Web that are considered as AI-complete problems. An example is co-reference resolution, which involves determining whether different URIs refer to the same entity. This is considered to be a significant hurdle to overcome in the realisation of large-scale Semantic Web applications. In this paper, we propose a framework for building a DHC system on top of the Linked Data Cloud to solve various computational problems. To demonstrate the concept, we are focusing on handling the co-reference resolution in the Semantic Web when integrating distributed datasets. The traditional way to solve this problem is to design machine-learning algorithms. However, they are often computationally expensive, error-prone and do not scale. We designed a DHC system named iamResearcher, which solves the scientific publication author identity co-reference problem when integrating distributed bibliographic datasets. In our system, we aggregated 6 million bibliographic data from various publication repositories. Users can sign up to the system to audit and align their own publications, thus solving the co-reference problem in a distributed manner. The aggregated results are published to the Linked Data Cloud
Intersystem soft handover for converged DVB-H and UMTS networks
No full textDigital video broadcasting for handhelds (DVB-H) is the standard for broadcasting Internet Protocol (IP) data services to mobile portable devices. To provide interactive services for DVB-H, the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) can be used as a terrestrial interaction channel for the unidirectional DVB-H network. The converged DVB-H and UMTS network can be used to address the congestion problems due to the limited multimedia channel accesses of the UMTS network. In the converged network, intersystem soft handover between DVB-H and UMTS is needed for an optimum radio resource allocation, which reduces network operation cost while providing the required quality of service. This paper deals with the intersystem soft handover between DVB-H and UMTS in such a converged network. The converged network structure is presented. A novel soft handover scheme is proposed and evaluated. After considering the network operation cost, the performance tradeoff between the network quality of service and the network operation cost for the intersystem soft handover in the converged network is modeled using a stochastic tree and analyzed using a numerical simulation. The results show that the proposed algorithm is feasible and has the potential to be used for implementation in the real environment
Beyond interfaces: A usability study of Chinese journal databases
No full textA presentation at the Council on East Asian Libraries (CEAL) annual meeting in Boston, MA on March 21, 2007
Rose Galaida and the Central China Relief Records, 1946: Discovery, Investigation, and Implications
No full textThe materials in the Central China Relief Records (CCRR) collection provide a window to the experiences of Rose Galaida in Hubei. The collection consists of about 100 documents totaling over 300 pages (excluding duplicate copies) and 5 photographs.Peer reviewedPublished in the Journal of East Asian Libraries and available from the journal at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/jeal/vol2011/iss153/
Breaking New Ground in East Asia Library History
No full textReview of Peter X. Zhou. Collecting Asia: East Asian Libraries in North America (2010).Published in H-Net Reviews in the Humanities and Social Sciences and available at: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=32231March 201
Light-induced enhancement of the minority carrier lifetime in boron-doped Czochralski silicon passivated by doped silicon nitride
No full textThis study reports a doubling of the effective minority carrier lifetime under light soaking conditions, observed in a boron-doped p-type Czochralski grown silicon wafer passivated by a phosphorus-doped silicon nitride thin film. The analysis of capacitance-voltage curves revealed that the fixed charge in this phosphorus-doped silicon nitride film was negative, which was unlike the well-known positive fixed charges observed in traditional undoped silicon nitride. The analysis results revealed that the enhancement phenomenon of minority carrier lifetime was caused by the abrupt increase in the density of negative fixed charge (from 7.2 x 10(11) to 1.2 x 10(12) cm(-2)) after light soaking. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved
One step preparation of pure tau-MnAl phase with high magnetization using strip casting method
No full textFerromagnetic phase of Mn-Al exhibits great potential in the rare-earth free permanent magnetic materials due to its high magnetocrystalline anisotropy, high magnetization, high Curie temperature and low cost. In this work, the strip casting technique was applied to prepare MnAl magnetic phase. X-ray diffraction and energy dispersive X-ray analyses indicate that the as-prepared Mn54Al46 strip sample consists of pure tau-MnAl magnetic phase. It is found that the composition of Mn54Al46 is suitable to prepare tau-MnAl phase during the strip casting process. The Mn54Al46 strip sample synthesized through the strip casting exhibits a fairly high magnetization of 114 emu/g under a field of 5 T, while the coercivity of iHc = 2.8 kOe, magnetization of M-5T = 63.9 emu/g at room temperature can be obtained for Mn54Al46 powder sample. This preparation method can produce a large amount of tau-phase MnAl alloy and promote mass industrialized production. (C) 2017 Author(s)
Numerical Study of Track-Trailer Gap Aerodynamics
No full textAerodynamics have become an essential design process for ground vehicles in order to improve the fuel consumption by lowering the emissions along with increasing the range of vehicles using different source of power. A significant portion of the world CO2 emissions is a result of ground vehicles with a more significant portion of these contributed by trucks. The boxy nature of trucks is the desired shape to carry maximum payload. However, a box shaped geometry is not aerodynamically efficient. Several manufacturers have developed aerodynamic add on devices that are optimized to the shape of the truck, in order to achieve gains in lowering emission and improving range by deeper understanding of the flow physics around the vehicle. The thesis reports an in-depth understanding of the flow field within the gap region of a tractor trailer combination truck and how several aerodynamic add on devices reduce the overall drag of a truck. The gap region of a truck typically contributes to about 20-25% of the overall vehicle drag and hence presents an opportunity for considerable level of drag reduction.
A basic two box bluff body (2D & 3D) model was used to investigate how the flow field changes by changing the gap width between the two bluff bodies. A section of the thesis investigates the sudden increase in drag coefficient of the downstream cube around 2D tandem bluff bodies. Distinct flow patterns were observed in the gap and around the 2D tandem at different gap ratios. The sudden change in drag coefficient for the 2D downstream bluff body is well captured numerically, which is due to the wake of the upstream cube impinging onto the front face of the downstream cube. A steady increase in drag coefficient is witnessed for the 3D cubes which are consistent with previous experimental findings. The steady increase in drag coefficient is due to the vortical structures formed around the 3D cubes which are different, which consist of a smooth transition. Hence, they result in steady increase in drag coefficient. A second study was conducted on a realistic truck like test case with the simplified truck model where the leading edges of the tractor were rounded off to manipulate the flow separation. As a result of leading edge rounding off the flow separation reduced significantly resulting in a major portion of the flow remain attached to the lateral walls of the tractor. This was seen to increase the flow entering the gap region between the tractor and trailer. Finally, several add on devices which were subdivided based on tractor and trailer mounted devices were numerically assessed with several other devices within the gap region. Significant level of drag reduction was achieved for the entire truck with these add on devices. The highest drag reduction was achieved with the base bleeding technique. Overall, the research has shown that it is important to control the flow condition within the gap region and maintain an even pressure on the front face of the trailer. The base bleeding method proved to be a vital technique to further reduce drag
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