Similar Formulation Research Articles

A stochastic optimization formulation for the transition from open pit to underground mining

As open pit mining of a mineral deposit deepens, the cost of extraction may increase up to a threshold where transitioning to mining through underground methods is more profitable. This paper provides an approach to determine an optimal depth at which a mine should transition from open pit to underground mining, based on managing technical risk. The value of a set of candidate transition depths is calculated by optimizing the production schedules for each depth’s unique open pit and underground operations which provide yearly discounted cash flow projections. By considering the sum of the open pit and underground mining portion’s value, the most profitable candidate transition depth is identified. The optimization model presented is based on a stochastic integer program that integrates geological uncertainty and manages technical risk. The proposed approach is tested on a gold deposit. Results show the benefits of managing geological uncertainty in long-term strategic decision-making frameworks. Additionally, the stochastic result produces a 9% net present value increase over a similar deterministic formulation. The risk-managing stochastic framework also produces operational schedules that reduce a mining project`s susceptibility to geological risk. This work aims to approve on previous attempts to solve this problem by jointly considering geological uncertainty and describing the optimal transition depth effectively in 3-dimensions.

How to improve adherence to treatment in patients with mild-to-moderate psoriasis.

Topical treatments are frequently used for the therapy of psoriasis. However, they may be associated with poor adherence in clinical practice. Therapeutic adherence is affected by patient's characteristics, as well as disease- and treatment-related factors; moreover, satisfaction with therapy, cosmetic acceptability, and complexity of the treatment regimen do also play a role. Since low adherence could lead to treatment failure, it is crucial to elaborate effective strategies aimed at improving patient adherence and thus clinical outcomes in psoriasis. To this purpose, here we have addressed several aspects of dermatological treatment that impact on adherence such as selection of therapy, selection of vehicle, and physician-patient communication. In addition, possible practical measures to improve adherence have also been discussed. In this light, we report that the use of calcipotriol and betamethasone dipropionate (Cal/BD) fixed-combination gel may be associated with improved patients' preference and better outcomes compared to similar formulations.

Elastic Net based sparse feature learning and classification for Alzheimer's disease identification.

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has been successfully applied to investigate neuron pathological changes. Since the high dimension of observation data, sparse feature learning plays an important role in overcoming the challenge of high variable dimension and low sample size problem among the disease identification. In this paper, sparse Elastic Net (EN) was used to extract low dimension features and to identify the Alzheimer's disease (AD). Compare with principal component analysis (PCA) method, the EN method can solve the problems of less samples and high correlations between variables. For those variables sharing the same biological phenomenon, it selected whole groups into the model automatically once one variable among them was selected. Unlike other subspace learning methods, the proposed method used less man-made feature setting. The problems of dimension reduction and classification were conducted into a similar formulation. Experimental results illustrated the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Sensory and instrumental study of Taralli, a typical Italian bakery product

Taralli is a bakery snack food, typical of the south of Italy, that has currently become very popular worldwide as a savory snack or bread substitute. However, few studies have focused on its physical and sensory characteristics. The present work aims to select sensory and instrumental information that is able to characterize Taralli with similar formulation and size. For sensory characterization purposes, conventional profiling was applied on samples from different producers. All samples were also subjected to physical analysis of appearance and textural proprieties. Three samples of the set, differing only in storage time, were evaluated to assess changes in sensory characteristics during this period and a discrimination test (triangle test) was also applied for this purpose. The test results confirmed that the sensory analysis allowed a description of the entire range of characteristics resulting from stimulation of senses by physicochemical properties of the food. This methodology was effective in evaluating the quality characteristics and identify differences between Taralli samples during different storage times. Instrumental tests were also applied to assess food quality. The results revealed that a combined approach allowed obtaining more information about the product characteristics and definition of quality standards. This study also suggests the use of physical parameters obtained by simple and rapid instrumental tools can support sensory analysis, especially for evaluations that are fatiguing, when decisions made with the sensory data are critical or to provide objective reference standards that are suitable for training purposes.

Probing the Cleaning of Polymeric Coatings by Nanostructured Fluids: A QCM-D Study.

Complex fluids composed of water, an organic solvent, and a surfactant have been recently employed as cleaning systems to remove hydrophobic materials, such as polymeric coatings, from solid surfaces. The simultaneous presence of surfactants and an organic solvent with good affinity for the polymer was proven necessary for the polymer's removal, but the comprehension of the cleaning mechanism is poorly understood. In this Article, we investigated the mechanism of removal, highlighting the specific role of each component in the interaction with the polymer film. In particular, the results from quartz crystal microbalance with dissipation monitoring (QCM-D) were compared with those obtained by using confocal microscopy to follow in situ the effect of a nanostructured fluid, i.e., a ternary formulation containing water, 2-butanone (MEK) as a good solvent for the polymer, and a nonionic surfactant (C9-11 ethoxylated alcohol, BR) on acrylic copolymer films (Paraloid B72). The results indicate a two-step process: (i) the penetration of the good solvent across the film causes the swelling of the polymer, the weakening of polymer-polymer interactions, and an increase of molecular mobility, followed by (ii) the slow adsorption of amphiphilic aggregates promoting the film detachment from the solid substrate. A different behavior is observed in the presence of similar formulations containing an anionic surfactant (sodium dodecyl sulfate, SDS), where the adsorption of SDS micelles on the surface of the polymeric film hinders solvent access into the polymer layer, rather than promoting its detachment from the solid substrate.

The interactions between soil–biosphere–atmosphere (ISBA) land surface model multi-energy balance (MEB) option in SURFEXv8 – Part 2: Introduction of a litter formulation and model evaluation for local-scale forest sites

Abstract. Land surface models (LSMs) need to balance a complicated trade-off between computational cost and complexity in order to adequately represent the exchanges of energy, water and matter with the atmosphere and the ocean. Some current generation LSMs use a simplified or composite canopy approach that generates recurrent errors in simulated soil temperature and turbulent fluxes. In response to these issues, a new version of the interactions between soil–biosphere–atmosphere (ISBA) land surface model has recently been developed that explicitly solves the transfer of energy and water from the upper canopy and the forest floor, which is characterized as a litter layer. The multi-energy balance (MEB) version of ISBA is first evaluated for three well-instrumented contrasting local-scale sites, and sensitivity tests are performed to explore the behavior of new model parameters. Second, ISBA-MEB is benchmarked against observations from 42 forested sites from the global micro-meteorological network (FLUXNET) for multiple annual cycles.It is shown that ISBA-MEB outperforms the composite version of ISBA in improving the representation of soil temperature, ground, sensible and, to a lesser extent, latent heat fluxes. Both versions of ISBA give comparable results in terms of simulated latent heat flux because of the similar formulations of the water uptake and the stomatal resistance. However, MEB produces a better agreement with the observations of sensible heat flux than the previous version of ISBA for 87.5 % of the simulated years across the 42 forested FLUXNET sites. Most of this improvement arises owing to the improved simulation of the ground conduction flux, which is greatly improved using MEB, especially owing to the forest litter parameterization. It is also shown that certain processes are also modeled more realistically (such as the partitioning of evapotranspiration into transpiration and ground evaporation), even if certain statistical performances are neutral. The analyses demonstrate that the shading effect of the vegetation, the explicit treatment of turbulent transfer for the canopy and ground, and the insulating thermal and hydrological effects of the forest floor litter turn out to be essential for simulating the exchange of energy, water and matter across a large range of forest types and climates.

Polychloroprene behaviour in a marine environment: Role of silica fillers

Polychloroprene rubbers are widely used in marine structures and often filled with silica in order to increase mechanical properties. The presence of silica fillers leads to a complex degradation of the material. This study aims to understand the deeper degradation mechanisms involved when a silica filled polychloroprene is used in sea water. To do so, 4 polychloroprene rubbers filled with different amounts of silica (from 0 to 45 phr) were aged in natural sea water for 6 months at temperatures ranging from 25 to 60 °C. Moreover, a natural rubber with similar formulation was also considered in order to evaluate the role of the chlorine atom in the degradation. The chemistry and mechanics of the rubber degradation were also studied. In the presence of water and silica fillers, a large decrease in rubber stiffness was observed. This was attributed to the breakage of hydrogen bonds involved in the interaction between the silica and chloroprene matrix and the process is reversible. In the meantime, silica undergoes hydrolysis that leads to silanol formation and so an increase in rubber stiffness when water is removed; this process is irreversible.

Optimization extreme learning machine with ν regularization

The problem of choosing error penalty parameter C for optimization extreme learning machine (OELM) is that it can take any positive value for different applications and it is therefore hard to choose correctly. In this paper, we reformulated OELM to take a new regularization parameter ν (ν-OELM) which is inspired by Schölkopf et al. The regularization in terms of ν is bounded between 0 and 1, and is easier to interpret as compared to C. This paper shows that: (1) ν-OELM and ν-SVM have similar dual optimization formulation, but ν-OELM has less optimization constraints due to its special capability of class separation and (2) experiment results on both artificial and real binary classification problems show that ν-OELM tends to achieve better generalization performance than ν-SVM, OELM and other popular machine learning approaches, and it is computationally efficient on high dimension data sets. Additionally, the optimal parameter ν in ν-OELM can be easily selected from few candidates.

Effect of modified-live bovine viral diarrhea virus type 2 vaccine on performance, health, temperature, and behavior response in high-risk beef heifer calves

The objective of this study was to determine performance, health, vaginal temperature, and behavior differences in calves vaccinated upon feedlot arrival with a multivalent modified-live virus (MLV) vaccine which included bovine viral diarrhea virus (BVDV) type 2 antigen and calves vaccinated with a vaccine which did not include BVOV type 2. Eightythree beef heifer calves were randomly assigned to receive a multivalent MLV vaccine containing either bovine herpesvirus-1, BVDV type 1, bovine respiratory syncytial virus, and parainfluenza type-3 virus (n = 42; 4-WAY), or a MLVvaccine of similar formulation which also contained a BVDV type 2 antigen (n = 41; 5-WAY). Performance outcomes were evaluated at 30 and 60 days. Vaginal temperatures were evaluated hourly and daily. Cattle behavior activity was monitored with a real-time location system. Calves in the 5-WAY group had greater average daily gain (P = 0.026) at 60 days, excluding dead animals, compared to 4-WAY group. Treatment group was not associated with vaginal temperature. Calves in 5-WAY spent a greater (P ~ 0.01) amount of time at the feed bunk on days 0, 2, 3, and 4 compared to 4-WAY. Results of this study indicate no adverse effects from administering an additional strain of BVOV type 2 to high-risk heifers. Behavioral responses indicate a potential advantage to administer 5-WAY vaccine compared to 4-WAY vaccine.

Dermal safety assessment of Arm & Hammer laundry products formulated for sensitive skin

Context: The prevalence of sensitive skin among the general population in industrialized countries is reported to be over 50%. Sensitive skin subjects often report significant reactions to contact with cosmetics, soaps and other consumer products.Objective: This paper describes the overall skin compatibility and mildness program for a newly developed, lightly fragranced, colorant free laundry product (i.e. Arm & Hammer™ Sensitive Skin plus Skin-Friendly Fresh Scent), specially formulated for individuals with sensitive skin. The skin mildness of the product was compared to Arm & Hammer™ Free & Clear liquid laundry detergent with no fragrance or colorant, and an established history of safe use by sensitive skin consumers.Materials and methods: The test material was a liquid laundry product with a light scent formulated for sensitive skin consumers (Arm & Hammer™ Sensitive Skin plus Skin-Friendly Fresh Scent). The product was compared to commercially marketed products for sensitive skin with a history of skin safety in the marketplace, including: a very similar product formulation (Arm & Hammer™ Free & Clear with no fragrance), and several selected competitors’ products. Studies were conducted among individuals with self-assessed sensitive skin (based on a questionnaire) using standard protocols for the Human Repeat Insult Patch Test (HRIPT), 10-Day Cumulative Irritation, the Wrist Band Wear test, and the Safety In-Use testing. Responses in all protocols were evaluated by visual scoring of potential dermatologic reactions, and recording any sensory effects at the time of the examination. In addition, sensory effects collected from panelists’ daily diaries were also evaluated.Results: The HRIPT confirmed that neither the fragrance alone, nor the product formulation with fragrance, induced contact sensitization in sensitive skin subjects. The 10-Day cumulative irritation study conducted using sensitive skin subjects showed highly favorable skin compatibility, and the test product was comparable to the control product (Arm & Hammer Free & Clear) and other nonirritant controls. In the Wrist Band Wear test, exposure to laundered fabrics under exaggerated conditions gave similar results for the test and control products, with no objective signs of skin irritation, and no self-reported persistent adverse sensory effects. Very mild, transient and isolated sensory effects were noted in daily diaries by a small proportion of subjects, and were similar for the test and control products. The Safety In-Use tests evaluated 4-week exposure to product and laundered fabrics under realistic use conditions. There were no clinically objective signs of skin irritation, and reports of transitory, mild sensory effects were minimal and similar for the test and controls.Discussion and conclusion: A comprehensive skin safety program on a lightly scented sensitive skin laundry formulation (i.e. Arm & Hammer™ Sensitive Skin plus Skin-Friendly Fresh Scent) conducted among panels of self-assessed sensitive skin subjects demonstrated that the presence of a light fragrance did not adversely impact skin compatibility in any of the testing protocols when the product was compared to a similar product with no fragrance. The lightly fragranced product demonstrated overall skin compatibility and mildness when tested in a self-assessed sensitive skin population, and compared favorably to currently marketed sensitive skin products.

Biodiesel Glycerides from the Soybean Ethylic Route Incomplete Conversion on the Diesel Engines Combustion Process

An evaluation was made to determine the effect of the glycerides presence resulting from the incomplete conversion of soybean biodiesel produced via alkaline catalysis and ethylic route on engine performance, and emissions in formulations containing 10 and 20% (m/m) of biodiesel used as additives in base diesel with low sulfur content and cetane ratings of 45 and 50. By way of comparison, similar formulations were used with soybean biodiesel methyl route with low concentration of glycerides. Tests on a diesel cycle engine with a mechanical fuel injection system indicated that the presence of glycerides decreases the volatility of biodiesel and increase the cetane number of fuels. The higher the cetane number, the higher the particulate matter emissions and the lower the unburned hydrocarbon emissions. Formulations with cetane number 50 showed higher emissions of particulate matter. The presence of glycerides in biodiesel reduces the fuel's vapor pressure, thereby increasing the cetane number and emissions of particulate matter and lower emissions of unburned hydrocarbons. The specific consumption of fuels formulated with biodiesel increases due to its lower enthalpy of combustion and to the presence of glycerides in fuels formulated with soybean biodiesel produced via the ethanol route.

CHANGEOVER FROM DECISION TREE APPROACH TO FUZZY LOGIC APPROACH WITHIN HIGHWAY MANAGEMENT

This paper deals with the changeover from decision tree (bivalent logic) approach to fuzzy logic approach to highway traffic control, particularly to variable speed limits display. The usage of existing knowledge from decision tree control is one of the most suitable methods for identication of new fuzzy model. However, such method introduces several difficulties. These difficulties are described and possible measures are proposed. Several fuzzy logic algorithms were developed and tested by a microsimulation model. The results are presented and the finest algorithm is recommended for testing on the Prague City Ring Road in real conditions. This paper provides a guidance for researchers and practitioners dealing with similar problem formulation.

Comprehensive Study of a Handheld Raman Spectrometer for the Analysis of Counterfeits of Solid-Dosage Form Medicines

The fight against medicine counterfeiting is a current focus of the pharmaceutical world. Reliable analytical tools are needed to pursue the counterfeiters. Handheld devices present the advantage of providing quick results, with analyses possibly performed on the field. A large number of solid-dosage form medicines have been analyzed with a handheld Raman spectrometer. 33 out of 39 product families could be successfully analysed. The methods were validated with 100% of correct identification. Each product was additionally tested by the methods of the other products and successfully rejected. A second validation was performed using counterfeits, placebos, and generics. All the counterfeits were rejected, withpvalues close to zero. Some generics presented a similar formulation to the brand products and were then identified as such. One placebo was positively identified, showing that low dosage products are difficult to analyze with Raman. Robustness tests were carried out, showing, for instance, that the operator has no influence on the results and that the analyses might be performed through transparent packaging. The discovery mode was also investigated, which proposes the chemical composition of the samples. The results demonstrated that the Raman handheld device is a reliable tool for the field analysis of counterfeits.

On the Convergence of Iterative Methods and Pseudoinverse Approaches in Global Meshless Collocation

In the context of numerical approximation of partial differential equations, meshless methods are recent developments, which have been reported to be relatively straightforward, yet provide better convergence and accuracy as compared to the conventional mesh-based approaches, for some specific problems like stress–strain analysis and modeling in a deforming media. Among several proposed schemes, strong-form collocation schemes using radial basis functions are easy-to-program, require no mesh in the domain or at the boundary, avoid numerical integration, and have similar formulations for all dimensions. Some of the radial basiss functions like the Gaussian, multiquadric and inverse-multiquadric are infinitely smooth. The standard global meshless formulations based on such radial basis functions are often found to lead towards ill-conditioned systems of linear equations. For such formulations, we investigate the degree of ill-conditioning against degrees of freedom for different radial basis functions. Also, the convergence of four iterative methods and pseudoinverse approaches has been tested for the solution of such ill-conditioned systems. In order to compute the pseudoinverse, two different approaches, i.e., singular value decomposition and full rank Cholesky factorization have been used. A set of numerical experiments, performed here, demonstrate that pseudoinverse approach based on singular value decomposition performs better than the iterative methods. Although, pseudoinverse computation via full rank Cholesky factorization is faster, it is not recommended in global meshless collocation schemes due to poor convergence at relatively large degrees of freedom.

Enhanced stability of emulsions treated by Ultra-High Pressure Homogenization for delivering conjugated linoleic acid in Caco-2 cells

Using novel technologies which offer higher protection and release of bioactive compounds is a current challenge in the food industry. Ultra-High-Pressure Homogenization (UHPH) is an emerging technology that produces physico-chemical and microbiological stable emulsions. The ability of oil-in-water emulsions stabilized by soy protein isolates (4%) to deliver conjugated linoleic acid (CLA, 6%), was studied. Emulsions were produced by UHPH at 200 MPa and by conventional homogenization (CH) at 15 MPa. For another batch of CH emulsions, a heat treatment was also conducted applying high-temperature-short-time conditions (72 °C for 20 s; CH-HTST). The physico-chemical properties of the emulsions were determined, as well as microbial, physical, and oxidative stability. The emulsions were subjected to in vitro digestion, and tested on absorptive Caco-2 cells. The presence of CLA isomers was followed throughout the process. When comparing similar formulations, UHPH emulsions showed smaller particle size and a homogeneous microstructure than emulsions prepared by CH or CH-HTST. Moreover, UHPH produced a sterile emulsion and showed better physical stability during storage compared to other treatments, maintaining an optimal oxidative stability until 3 months. After in vitro digestion and delivery in Caco-2 cells, similar percentages of bioavailability of CLA were found for all the emulsion treatments. The study has gone towards enhancing oil-in-water emulsions by using UHPH technology for delivering conjugated linoleic acid in functional foods.

Enhancing web search with queries of equivalent intents

Users often issue all kinds of queries to look for the same target due to the intrinsic ambiguity and flexibility of natural languages. Some previous work clusters queries based on co-clicks; however, the intents of queries in one cluster are not that similar but roughly related. It is desirable to conduct automatic mining of queries with equivalent intents from a large scale search logs. In this paper, we take account of similarities between query strings. There are two issues associated with such similarities: it is too costly to compare any pair of queries in large scale search logs, and two queries with a similar formulation, such as "SVN" (Apache Subversion) and support vector machine (SVM), are not necessarily similar in their intents. To address these issues, we propose using the similarities of query strings above the co-click based clustering results. Our method improves precision over the co-click based clustering method (lifting precision from 0.37 to 0.62), and outperforms a commercial search engine's query alteration (lifting $$F_1$$F1 measure from 0.42 to 0.56). As an application, we consider web document retrieval. We aggregate similar queries' click-throughs with the query's click-throughs and evaluate them on a large scale dataset. Experimental results indicate that our proposed method significantly outperforms the baseline method of using a query's own click-throughs in all metrics.

Development of spinel sol bonded high pure alumina castable composition

A cement free high pure alumina castable composition is developed for high temperature applications using synthesized Mg-Al spinel sol as binder. The spinel sol is prepared from nitrate precursors and characterized for its pH, solid content, particle size, FTIR, thermal behavior (DSC-TG), phase formation with temperature (XRD), microstructure (FESEM), etc. High alumina castable formulations with different particle size distributions (PSDS) are conventionally processed using the synthesized sol as sole binder at two different amounts. Castables were characterized for various refractory properties after heat treatment at different temperatures. The hot strength and the corrosion resistance of the best composition are evaluated and the properties are compared with silica sol bonded high alumina castable with similar formulations, processed under similar conditions. Considerable improvement in terms of hot strength, corrosion resistance and thermal shock resistance are obtained for the spinel sol bonded composition.

Scintillation analysis of multiple-input single-output underwater optical links.

Multiple-input single-output (MISO) techniques are employed in underwater wireless optical communication (UWOC) links to mitigate the degrading effects of oceanic turbulence. In this paper, we consider a MISO UWOC system which consists of a laser beam array as transmitter and a point detector as receiver. Our aim is to find the scintillation index at the detector in order to quantify the system performance. For this purpose, the average intensity and the average of the square of the intensity are derived in underwater turbulence by using the extended Huygens-Fresnel principle. The scintillation index and the average bit-error-rate (⟨BER⟩) formulas presented in this paper depend on the oceanic turbulence parameters, such as the rate of dissipation of the mean-squared temperature, rate of dissipation of kinetic energy per unit mass of fluid, Kolmogorov microscale, and the ratio of temperature to salinity contributions to the refractive index spectrum, the link length, and the wavelength. Recently, we have derived an equivalent structure constant of atmospheric turbulence and expressed it in terms of the oceanic turbulence parameters [Appl. Opt.55, 1228 (2016)APOPAI0003-693510.1364/AO.55.001228]. In the formulation in this paper, this equivalent structure constant is utilized, which enables us to employ the existing similar formulation valid in atmospheric turbulence.

Improved hybrid boundary solution for shell elements

In this paper, a new finite element for shell structures is developed using an improved hybrid boundary solution. First the variational boundary integral equation for shear-deformable plate bending problems is developed based on quadratic boundary elements. Hence such a formulation is coupled to a similar formulation for 2D plane stress problems to produce the developed shell elements. Numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the accuracy and validity of the proposed formulation.

Effect of dietary L-malic acid supplementation on growth, feed utilization and digestive function of juvenile GIFT tilapiaOreochromis niloticus(Linnaeus, 1758)

Two feeding trials (FTs) were conducted in 2013 and 2014, respectively, to determine the optimal L-malic acid (LMA) level for juvenile GIFT (Genetically Improved Farmed Tilapia) Oreochromis niloticus. Except for the LMA level, the FT1 and FT2 had a similar diet formulation. In FT1, LMA was included at 0 (basal diet), 1, 4, 8, 16 and 32 g kg−1, respectively. After 20 weeks, daily weight gain and feed conversion ratio were improved but not differentiated with 1–8 g kg−1 LMA. Further increasing the LMA supply initially decreased the feed intake (16 g kg−1), and then decreased both feed intake and feed utilization (32 g kg−1), thus impairing the fish growth. FT2 was subsequently conducted with a smaller LMA range (0, 0.5, 1, 2, 4 and 8 g kg−1, respectively) but was unfortunately terminated at the end of 8 weeks because 20% of the fish were badly injured during weighing. Unexpectedly, growth and feed utilization were still improved but not differentiated with 0.5–8 g kg−1 LMA. In FT2, beneficial effects of LMA inclusion on the digestive function (pepsin, foregut amylase and foregut lipase), the activities of serum lysozyme and hepatic superoxide dismutase, and liver lipid peroxidation (malondialdehyde concentration) were found. Taking the results of FT1 and FT2 together, it could be concluded that dietary LMA supplementation at low concentrations (0.5–8 g kg−1) could improve growth and feed utilization, but excess LMA (≥16 g kg−1) might compromise feed intake and/or feed utilization, thus impairing fish growth. To reduce feed costs in commercial practice, 0.5 g kg−1 LMA is recommended in the feed of juvenile GIFT tilapia based on the results of this study.