In this paper, a semi-analytical solution for free vibration differential equations of curved girders is proposed based on their mathematical properties and vibration characteristics. The solutions of in-plane vibration differential equations are classified into two cases: one only considers variable separation of non-longitudinal vibration, while the other is a synthesis method addressing both longitudinal and non-longitudinal vibrationusing Rayleigh’s modal assumption and variable separation method. A similar approach is employed for the out-of-plane vibration, but further mathematical operations are conducted to incorporate the coupling effect of bending and twisting. In this case study, the natural frequencies of a curved girder under different boundary conditions are obtained using the two proposed methods, respectively. The results are compared with those from the finite element analysis (FEA) and results show good convergence.
A study was undertaken to investigate the effects of crumb rubber on the strength and mechanical behaviour of Rubberized cement soil (RCS). In the present investigation, 26 groups of soil samples were prepared at five different percentages of crumb rubber content, four different percentages of cement content and two different finenesses of crumb rubber particle. Compressive strength tests were carried out at the curing age of 7 days, 14 days, 28 days and 90 days. The test results indicated that the inclusion of crumb rubber within cement soil leads to a decrease in the compressive strength and stiffness and improves the cement soil’s brittle behaviour to a more ductile one. A reduction of up to 31% in the compressive strength happened in the 20% crumb content group. The compressive strength increases with the increase in the cement content. And the enlargement of cement content is more efficient at low cement content.
Self-incompatibility (SI) is a genetic system that promotes outcrossing by rejecting self-pollen. In the Brassicaceae the SI response is mediated by the pistil S-locus receptor kinase (SRK) and its ligand, pollen Slocus cysteine-rich (SCR) protein. Transfer of SRK-SCR gene pairs to self-fertile Arabidopsis thaliana enabled establishment of robust SI, making this transgenic self-incompatible A. thaliana an excellent platform for SI analysis. Here we report isolation of a novel A. thaliana self-incompatibility mutant, AtC24 SI mutant, induced by heavy-ion beam irradiation. We show that the AtC24 SI mutant exhibits breakdown of SI, with pollen hydration, pollen tube growth and seed set resembling the corresponding processes in wild-type (self-fertile) A. thaliana. Further reciprocal crosses indicated that some perturbed SI factor in the stigmatic cell of the AtC24 SI mutant is responsible for the observed phenotype, while the pollen response remained intact. Our results demonstrate successful application of heavy-ion beam irradiation to induce a novel A. thaliana self-incompatibility mutant useful for SI studies.
The Gaussian mixture model (GMM) method is popular and efficient for voice conversion (VC), but it is often subject to overfitting. In this paper, the principal component regression (PCR) method is adopted for the spectral mapping between source speech and target speech, and the numbers of principal components are adjusted properly to prevent the overfitting. Then, in order to better model the nonlinear relationships between the source speech and target speech, the kernel principal component regression (KPCR) method is also proposed. Moreover, a KPCR combined with GMM method is further proposed to improve the accuracy of conversion. In addition, the discontinuity and oversmoothing problems of the traditional GMM method are also addressed. On the one hand, in order to solve the discontinuity problem, the adaptive median filter is adopted to smooth the posterior probabilities. On the other hand, the two mixture components with higher posterior probabilities for each frame are chosen for VC to reduce the oversmoothing problem. Finally, the objective and subjective experiments are carried out, and the results demonstrate that the proposed approach shows greatly better performance than the GMM method. In the objective tests, the proposed method shows lower cepstral distances and higher identification rates than the GMM method. While in the subjective tests, the proposed method obtains higher scores of preference and perceptual quality.
Applying pesticides to crops is one of the causes of water pollution by surface runoff, and chlorpyrifos, trifluralin and chlorothalonil are used respectively as insecticide, herbicide and fungicide for crop plants widely. To explore effects of three pesticides on aquatic organisms, superoxide dismutase (SOD) and glutathione S-transferase (GST) activities were determined after 24 h and 48 h exposure of D. magna with ages of 6–24 h to several low concentrations of chlorpyrifos (0.36, 0.72, 1.43, 2.86, 5.72 μg∙L−1), trifluralin (0.17, 0.33, 0.66, 1.33, 2.65 mg∙L−1) and chlorothalonil (0.09, 0.18, 0.36, 0.72, 1.43 mg∙L−1) respectively. Main reproductive parameters including first pregnancy time, first brood time, the number of first brood and total fecundity after 21 d exposures at the same concentrations of pesticides as described above were also measured. The results showed that the activities of GST increased in lower concentrations and decreased in higher concentrations after 24 h exposure to three pesticides, respectively. The activities of SOD showed the same changes after 48 h exposure. With the time prolonged, the activities of GST decreased while the activities of SOD increased. After 21 d exposure, the first pregnancy time and first brood time were delayed, while the number of the first brood and total fecundity per female decreased with increasing concentrations. These results corroborated that GST activity was more sensitive to those pesticides than SOD activity, and there was a significant relationship between total fecundity and pesticides-dose(r>0.94, n=6), GST activity after 48 h exposure and total fecundity after 21 d exposure (r>0.92, n=6).
We explored the use of the medicinally important plant Centella asiatica for expression of hemagglutinin-neuraminidase (HN) protein of Newcastle disease virus (NDV) strain AF2240. HN protein is the principal target for subunit vaccine development against NDV. The full-length HN gene was cloned into a plant expression construct driven by the CaMV 35S promoter and C-terminal fusion of green fluorescence protein (GFP) as reporter system. The recombinant expression construct was transformed via particle bombardment into C. asiatica callus. Transformants were screened using GFP and selected on MS medium supplemented with 15 mg/l hygromycin. The ~1.8 kb HN mRNA transcript was detected on the putative transformants using RT-PCR. The presence of HN protein expression was further confirmed through dot blot analysis using anti-NDV chicken serum. Here we report, for the first time, the use of a novel medicinal plant as a new platform for HN protein expression.
A novel VC (voice conversion) method based on hybrid SVR (support vector regression) and GMM (Gaussian mixture model) is presented in the paper, the mapping abilities of SVR and GMM are exploited to map the spectral features of the source speaker to those of target ones. A new strategy of F0 transformation is also presented, the F0s are modeled with spectral features in a joint GMM and predicted from the converted spectral features using the SVR method. Subjective and objective tests are carried out to evaluate the VC performance; experimental results show that the converted speech using the proposed method can obtain a better quality than that using the state-of-the-art GMM method. Meanwhile, a VC method based on non-parallel data is also proposed, the speaker-specific information is investigated using the SVR method and preliminary subjective experiments demonstrate that the proposed method is feasible when a parallel corpus is not available.
In a PV-dominant DC microgrid, the traditional energy distribution method based on the droop control method has problems such as output voltage drop, insufficient power distribution accuracy, etc. Meanwhile, different battery energy storage units usually have different parameters when the system is running. Therefore, this paper proposes an improved control method that introduces a reference current correction factor, and a weighted calculation method for load power distribution based on the parameters of battery energy storage units is proposed to achieve weighted allocation of load power. In addition, considering the variation of bus voltage at the time of load mutation, voltage secondary control is added to realize dynamic adjustment of DC bus voltage fluctuation. The proposed method can achieve balance and stable operation of energy storage units. The simulation results verified the effectiveness and stability of the proposed control strategy.
In this study, the corrosion properties of Ti-6Mo-6V-5Cr-3Sn-2.5Zr alloy were investigated as a function of the cold rolling ratio and annealing temperature. The annealing treatment was carried out at temperature of 680°C, 730°C, and 780°C. The highest corrosion potential observed in the specimen with a 10% rolling ratio was 179 mV, which was more positive than that of the non-rolled specimen (–0.214 Vssc). The lowest corrosion current density (1.30×10–8 A/cm2) was observed in the non-rolled specimen which suggested that the integrity of its passive oxide layer was superior to that of the cold-rolled specimens. Time-dependent EIS evaluation revealed that the consistency of the passive oxide layer was highly affected by the subjected rolling ratio over time.
The Mn-Zn ferrite powders prepared by high energy ball milling were heat-treated, subsequently compacted and sintered by spark plasma sintering (SPS). Based on the observation of microstructure, the characteristics of samples after SPS were investigated and compared with ones after conventional sintering. The size of initial powders was approximately 650 nm and decreased to 230 nm after milling at 300 rpm for 3 h. After heat treatment at 973K for 1h, the milled powders became larger to approximately 550 nm in size again and the peaks of Mn2O3 disappeared in XRD patterns. In the samples after SPS, the Fe2O3 and MnZnFe2O4 phases decomposed at the higher temperatures than 1173K and 1373K, respectively, while only MnZnFe2O4 phase was detected in the samples conventionally sintered at 1273~1673K. As the sintering temperature increased, the relative density after SPS increased more quickly than that after conventional sintering. In particular, it reached approximately 99% after SPS at 1473K.
The field of mechanical manufacturing is becoming more and more demanding on machining accuracy. It is essential to monitor and compensate the deformation of structural parts of a heavy-duty machine tool. The deformation of the base of a heavy-duty machine tool is an important factor that affects machining accuracy. The base is statically indeterminate and complex in load. It is difficult to reconstruct deformation by traditional methods. A reconstruction algorithm for determining bending deformation of the base of a heavy-duty machine tool using inverse Finite Element Method (iFEM) is presented. The base is equivalent to a multi-span beam which is divided into beam elements with support points as nodes. The deflection polynomial order of each element is analysed. According to the boundary conditions, the deformation compatibility conditions and the strain data measured by Fiber Bragg Grating (FBG), the deflection polynomial coefficients of a beam element are determined. Using the coordinate transformation, the deflection equation of the base is obtained. Both numerical verification and experiment were carried out. The deflection obtained by the reconstruction algorithm using iFEM and the actual deflection measured by laser displacement sensors were compared. The accuracy of the reconstruction algorithm is verified.
In this paper, 3 typical organic fluids were selected as working fluids for a sample slag washing water binary power plants. In this system, the working fluids obtain the thermal energy from slag washing water sources. Thus, it plays a significant role on the cycle performance to select the suitable working fluid. Energy and exergy efficiencies of 3 typical organic fluids were calculated. Dry type fluids (i.e., R227ea) showed higher energy and exergy efficiencies. Conversely, wet fluids (i.e., R143a and R290) indicated lower energy and exergy efficiencies, respectively.
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