Reducing Occupational Noise Propagated from Centrifugal Fan through Dissipative Silencers: A Field Study

Acoustic performance of dissipative silencer was evaluated to determine the effectiveness of perforated duct porosity and absorbent material density in reducing occupational noise exposure propagated from centrifugal fan. Design charts were applied to predict noise reduction and length of a dissipative silencer. Dissipative silencers with various punched duct porosity (14%, 30% and 40%) and sound absorbent density (80 Kg/m³, 120 Kg/m³, and 140 Kg/m³) were designed and fabricated. According to ISO9612 and ISO11820, noise level was measured before and after installing all nine test silencers at fixed workstations around the discharge side of a centrifugal fan in a manufacturing plant. On average, the noise level at the discharge side of a fan without silencer was measured to be 93.6 dBA, whereas it was significantly mitigated by 67.4 dBA to 70.1 dBA after installing all silencers. Dynamic insertion loss for a dissipative silencer with 100 cm length was predicted to be 27.9 dB, which was in agreement with experimental ones. Although, there was no significant differences between insertion loss of silencers, the one with 30% porosity and 120 Kg/m³ rock wool density had the highest insertion loss of 26.2 dBA. Dissipative silencers noticeably reduced centrifugal fan noise exposures. Increasing sound absorbent density and duct porosity up to a certain limit could probably be effective in noise reduction of dissipative silencers.     

Seeing the Unseen: Experimental Observation of Magnetic Anapole State Inside a High-Index Dielectric Particle

The existence of non-radiating electromagnetic sources attracts much attention in photonic community and gives rise to extensive discussions of various applications in lasing, medical imaging, sensing, and nonlinear optics. In this article, the existence of magnetic anapole states (or magnetic-type non-radiating sources) characterized by a suppressed magnetic dipole radiation in a dielectric cylindrical particle is theoretically predicted and experimentally demonstrated. The specific features of the magnetic anapole state under ideal conditions are identified, followed by a demonstration of how their existence can be detected in practical structures. The concept is valid in various frequency bands from visible range for nanoparticles to microwave range for millimeter size objects. The experimental study is performed in microwave frequency range which allows not only to measure the far-field (scattered field) characteristics, but also to probe the peculiar field profile directly inside the dielectric particle. The experimental results agree well with the analytical ones and pave the way to detect and identify nontrivial different-type anapole states.     

Influence of imide functionalized organo‐modified Mg‐Al layered double hydroxide on the thermal and mechanical properties of new aliphatic‐aromatic poly (amide‐imide)

A new dicarboxylic acid modified Mg‐Al LDH (DLDH) containing imide groups was prepared and its effects on the thermal and mechanical properties of the new synthesized aliphatic‐aromatic poly (amide‐imide) (PAI) were investigated via preparation of PAI/nanocomposite films by solution casting method. The results of X‐ray diffraction (XRD), field emission‐scanning electron microscopy (FE‐SEM) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) showed a uniform dispersion for LDH layers into the PAI matrix. For comparison, the effects of polyacrylic acid‐co‐poly‐2‐acrylamido‐ 2‐methylpropanesulfonic acid (PAMPS‐co‐PAA) modified Mg‐Al LDH (ALDH) on the PAI properties were also studied. The thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) results exhibited that the temperature at 5 mass% loss (T₅) increased from 277 °C to 310 °C for nanocomposite containing 2 mass% of DLDH, while T₅ for nanocomposite containing 2 mass% of ALDH increased to 320 °C, along with the more enhancement of char residue compared to the neat PAI. According to the tensile test results, with 5 mass% DLDH loading in the PAI matrix, the tensile strength increased from 51.6 to 70.8 MPa along with an increase in Young's modulus. Also the Young's modulus of PAI nanocomposite containing 5 mass% ALDH reduced from 1.95 to 0.81 GPa.     

Catalytic study of the copper-based magnetic nanocatalyst on the aerobic oxidation of alcohols in water

A copper-based magnetic nanocatalyst has been prepared by co-precipitation method and characterized by FESEM, EDS, TEM, XRD, XRF, ICP–OES, FTIR, and BET analysis. This new nanocatalyst displays a good activity toward the aerobic oxidation of a wide range of alcohols in water. Moreover, it is recyclable up to five following runs by simple filtration without any significant loss of its catalytic activity.

     

Combined OX40 Agonist and PD-1 Inhibitor Immunotherapy Improves the Efficacy of Vascular Targeted Photodynamic Therapy in a Urothelial Tumor Model

Purpose: Vascular targeted photodynamic therapy (VTP) is a nonsurgical tumor ablation approach used to treat early-stage prostate cancer and may also be effective for upper tract urothelial cancer (UTUC) based on preclinical data. Toward increasing response rates to VTP, we evaluated its efficacy in combination with concurrent PD-1 inhibitor/OX40 agonist immunotherapy in a urothelial tumor-bearing model. Experimental design: In mice allografted with MB-49 UTUC cells, we compared the effects of combined VTP with PD-1 inhibitor/OX40 agonist with those of the component treatments on tumor growth, survival, lung metastasis, and antitumor immune responses. Results: The combination of VTP with both PD-1 inhibitor and OX40 agonist inhibited tumor growth and prolonged survival to a greater degree than VTP with either immunotherapeutic individually. These effects result from increased tumor infiltration and intratumoral proliferation of cytotoxic and helper T cells, depletion of Treg cells, and suppression of myeloid-derived suppressor cells. Conclusions: Our findings suggest that VTP synergizes with PD-1 blockade and OX40 agonist to promote strong antitumor immune responses, yielding therapeutic efficacy in an animal model of urothelial cancer.     

Molecular Architecture Manipulation in Free Radical Copolymerization: An Advanced Monte Carlo Approach to Screening Copolymer Chains with Various Comonomer Sequence Arrangements

A Kinetic Monte Carlo (KMC) simulation approach has been adopted in this study to capture evolutionary events in the course of free radical copolymerization, through which batch and starved‐feed semibatch processes are compared. The implementation of the KMC code deve­loped in this work: (i) enables satisfactory control of the molecular weight of the copolymer by tracking the profiles of concentrations of macroradicals, monomers, and polymer as well as degree of polymerization, polydispersity, and chain length distribution; (ii) captures the bivariate distribution of chain length and copolymer composition; (iii) comprehensively tracks and analyzes detailed information on the molecular architecture of the growing chains, thus distinguishing between sequence length and polydispersity of chains produced in batch and starved‐feed semibatch operations; (iv) makes possible the screening of products, based on such details as the number and weight fractions of products having different comonomer units located at various positions along the copolymer chains. The aforementioned characteristics are achieved by stochastic calculations through code developed in‐house. This KMC simulator becomes a very useful tool for the development of tailored copolymers through free radical polymerization, with blocks separated with single units of a different type.

     

A Spectral Method for the Electrohydrodynamic Flow in a Circular Cylindrical Conduit

This paper presents a combination of the hybrid spectral collocation technique and the spectral homotopy analysis method(SHAM for short) for solving the nonlinear boundary value problem(BVP for short) for the electrohydrodynamic flow of a fluid in an ion drag configuration in a circular cylindrical conduit. The accuracy of the present solution is found to be in excellent agreement with the previously published solution. The authors use an averaged residual error to find the optimal convergence-control parameters. Comparisons are made between SHAM generated results, results from literature and Matlab ode45 generated results, and good agreement is observed.     

Accessible single-valued neutrosophic graphs

This paper derived single-valued neutrosophic graphs from single-valued neutrosophic hypergraphs via strong equivalence relation. We show that any weak single-valued neutrosophic graph is a derived single-valued neutrosophic graph and any linear weak single-valued neutrosophic tree is an extendable linear single-valued neutrosophic tree.