Search results for "reduction"

Metabolic Impacts of Confinement during the COVID-19 Pandemic Due to Modified Diet and Physical Activity Habits

2020

While the detrimental effects of a chronic positive energy balance due to a sedentary lifestyle have been well established, the impacts of a short period of abruptly reduced physical activity and overeating arising from strict confinement due to the COVID-19 pandemic will soon start to emerge. To reasonably anticipate major consequences according to the available evidence, we hereby review the literature for studies that have explored the health impacts of several weeks of a reduction in physical activity and daily step-count combined with modified eating habits. These studies identify as main metabolic consequences increases in insulin resistance, total body fat, abdominal fat and inflamma…

Autonomous Mooring towards Autonomous Maritime Navigation and Offshore Operations

2020

Bollard is a vital component of mooring system. It is the anchor point for mooring ropes to be fixed in order to secure the vessel or ship. An algorithm that translates the segmented mask of bollard output from masked R-CNN along with bounding box and associated class probability to its corresponding edge coordinate and finally to the single reference point for efficient detection and classification of bollard towards autonomous mooring is presented. At first stage, Mask R-CNN framework is trained with custom built bollard. The model obtained from the training is inferred with real data resulting in instance segment of bollard. The segmented mask obtained contains relatively large amount of…

Tunable axial superresolution by annular binary filters. Application to confocal microscopy

1995

We present a set of annular binary pupil filters for increasing the axial resolving capacity of imaging systems. The filters consist of two transparent annuli of the same area. It is shown that by changing the area of the transparent regions it is possible to obtain a tunable reduction of the width of the central lobe of the axial point spread function of the imaging system. However, this reduction is accompanied by a severe increase of the strength of secondary lobes, what can make these filters not very useful when used in conventional imaging systems. That is why we propose to use these filters for apodizing confocal microscopy systems. It is shown that in this case an important reductio…

A reliable incremental method of computing the limit load in deformation plasticity based on compliance : Continuous and discrete setting

2016

The aim of this paper is to introduce an enhanced incremental procedure that can be used for the numerical evaluation and reliable estimation of the limit load. A conventional incremental method of limit analysis is based on parametrization of the respective variational formulation by the loading parameter ? ? ( 0 , ? l i m ) , where ? l i m is generally unknown. The enhanced incremental procedure is operated in terms of an inverse mapping ? : α ? ? where the parameter α belongs to ( 0 , + ∞ ) and its physical meaning is work of applied forces at the equilibrium state. The function ? is continuous, nondecreasing and its values tend to ? l i m as α ? + ∞ . Reduction of the problem to a finit…

DC polarographic reduction of chloroguanide hydrochloride.

1984

Chloroguanide hydrochloride, an antimalarial drug, shows one well-defined DC polarographic wave in Britton-Robinson buffered media. In the pH range 3–9 the observed reduction wave is related to the reduction of the two azomethine centers on the monoprotonated biguanide group (BH+). The effects of pH and other experimental variables on the limiting current and half-wave potentials as well as the reduction mechanism are discussed.

On the Reduction of Power Consumption in Vortexing Unbaffled Bioslurry Reactors

2020

Bioremediation of polluted soils via bioslurry reactors is an interesting option among those available nowadays, especially when recalcitrant pollutants are present. Vortexing unbaffled stirred tanks may be a valuable choice to this purpose as they were recently found to be more efficient than baffled vessels for solid suspension processes where mixing time is not a controlling factor. When operated at sufficiently high agitation speeds, the central vortex bottom reaches the impeller and air bubbles start to be distributed throughout the system, thus avoiding any sparger and related clogging issues. In the present work, a vortexing unbaffled stirred tank with solid loadings ranging from 2.5…

CO<inf>2</inf> reduction exploiting RES for EV charging

2016

The world is facing an urgent need to reduce emissions, limiting pollution for a better quality of life. This objective has to be reached by all cities and governments worldwide. This paper focuses on the field of transportation, which is greatly responsible for air pollution, mainly in cities and urban areas such as towns, airports and seaports. The diffusion of electric vehicles (EVs) enables a significant reduction of air pollutants emitted by combustion engines; however, their recharge can affect the total pollution by their increasing energy demand. A solution is the use of Renewable Energy Sources (RES) to charge EVs. This paper analyzes the feasibility of integrating EVs and RES, foc…

Evaluation of Charge‐Regulated Supramolecular Copolymerization to Tune the Time Scale for Oxidative Disassembly of β‐Sheet Comonomers

2019

A multistimuli-responsive supramolecular copolymerization is reported. The copolymerization is driven by hydrogen bond encoded β-sheet-based charge co-assembly into 1D nanorods in water, using glutamic acid or lysine residues in either of the peptide comonomers. The incorporation of methionine as hydrophobic amino acid supports β-sheet formation, but oxidation of the thioether side-chain to a sulfoxide functional group destabilizes the β-sheet ordered domains and induces disassembly of the supramolecular polymers. Using H2 O2 as reactive oxygen species, the time scale and kinetics of the oxidative disassembly are probed. Compared to the charge neutral homopolymers, it is found that the oxid…

Oxidative Addition of Halogens on Open Metal Sites in a Microporous Spin-Crossover Coordination Polymer

2009

A Comparison between Three Meta-Modeling Optimization Approaches to Design a Tube Hydroforming Process

2012

Computer aided procedures to design and optimize forming processes have become crucial research topics as the industrial interest in cost and time reduction has been increasing. A standalone numerical simulation approach could make the design too time consuming while meta-modeling techniques enables faster approximation of the investigated phenomena, reducing the simulation time. Many researchers are, nowadays, facing such research challenge by using various approaches. Response surface method (RSM) is probably the most known one, since its effectiveness was demonstrated in the past years. The effectiveness of RSM depends both on the definition of the Design of Experiments (DoE) and the acc…