Agglomeration,sedimentation, and cellular toxicity of alumina nanoparticles in cell culture medium

The cytotoxicity of alumina nanoparticles (NPs) was investigated for a wide range of concentration (25–200 μg/mL) and incubation time (0–72 h) using floating cells (THP-1) and adherent cells (J774A.1, A549, and 293). Alumina NPs were gradually agglomerated over time although a significant portion of sedimentation occurred at the early stage within 6 h. A decrease of the viability was found in floating (THP-1) and adherent (J774A.1 and A549) cells in a dose-dependent manner. However, the time-dependent decrease in cell viability was observed only in adherent cells (J774A.1 and A549), which is predominantly related with the sedimentation of alumina NPs in cell culture medium. The uptake of alumina NPs in macrophages and an increased cell-to-cell adhesion in adherent cells were observed. There was no significant change in the viability of 293 cells. This in vitro test suggests that the agglomeration and sedimentation of alumina NPs affected cellular viability depending on cell types such as monocytes (THP-1), macrophages (J774A.1), lung carcinoma cells (A549), and embryonic kidney cells (293).     

Enhanced multi‐objective optimization of a dimpled channel through evolutionary algorithms and multiple surrogate methods

Using a multi‐objective evolutionary algorithm (MOEA) and enhanced surrogate approximations, the present study demonstrates the numerical analysis and optimization of staggered‐dimple channels. Two surrogates, the response surface approximation (RSA) model and the Kriging (KRG) model, are applied in light of the surrogate fidelity of the approximate analysis. An enhanced Pareto‐optimal front is obtained by performing local resampling of the Pareto‐optimal front, which provides relatively more accurate Pareto‐optimal solutions in the design space for each surrogate model. Three dimensionless design variables are selected, which are related to geometric parameters, namely, the channel height, dimple print diameter, dimple spacing, and dimple depth. Two objective functions are selected that are related to the heat transfer and pressure loss, respectively. The objective‐function values are numerically evaluated through Reynolds‐averaged Navier–Stokes analysis at the design points that are selected through the Latin hypercube sampling method. Using these numerical simulations two surrogates, viz, the RSA and Kriging models, are constructed for each objective function and a hybrid MOEA is applied to obtain the Pareto‐optimal front. For the particular implementation of surrogate models, it is observed that Pareto‐optimal predictions of the RSA model are better than those of the KRG model, whereas the KRG model predicts equally well at the off‐Pareto‐region (region away from the Pareto‐optimal solutions), which is not the case with the RSA model. The local resampling of the Pareto‐optimal front increases the fidelity of the approximate solutions near the Pareto‐optimal region. The ratios of the channel height to the dimple print diameter and of the dimple print diameter to the dimple pitch are found to be more sensitive along the Pareto‐optimal front than the ratio of the dimple depth to the print diameter. The decrease of the ratio of the channel height to the dimple diameter and the increase of the ratio of the dimple print diameter to the pitch lead to greater heat transfer at the expense of the pressure loss, whereas the ratio of the dimple depth to the print diameter is rather insensitive to Pareto‐optimal solutions. Pareto‐optimal solutions at higher values of the Nusselt number are associated with higher values of the pressure loss due to the increased recirculation, mixing of fluid and vorticity generation. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Seabed classification from acoustic profiling data using the similarity index

We introduce the similarity index (SI) for the classification of the sea floor from acoustic profiling data. The essential part of our approach is the singular value decomposition of the data to extract a signal coherent trace-to-trace using the Karhunen-Loeve transform. SI is defined as the percentage of the energy of the coherent part contained in the bottom return signals. Important aspects of SI are that it is easily computed and that it represents the textural roughness of the sea floor as a function of grain size, hardness, and a degree of sediment sorting. In a real data example, we classified a section of the sea floor off Cheju Island south of the Korean Peninsula and compared the result with the sedimentology defined from direct sediment sampling and side scan sonar records. The comparison shows that SI can efficiently discriminate the bottom properties by delineating sediment-type boundaries and transition zones in more detail. Therefore, we propose that SI is an effective parameter for geoacoustic modeling.     

Synthesis and characterization of diphenylaminodiphenyl stryl based alternating copolymers

Diphenylaminobiphenylated stryl based alternating copolymers with phenyl or fluorene, which were expected to have a terphenylene vinylene backbone containing an (N,N‐diphenylamino)biphenyl pendant and a phenyl/fluorene/phenylene vinylene backbone containing an (N,N‐diphenylamino)biphenyl pendant, were synthesized by a Suzuki coupling reaction. The obtained copolymers were confirmed with various types of spectroscopy. The alternating copolymers showed good hole‐injection properties because of their low oxidation potential and good solubility and high thermal stability with a high glass‐transition temperature. The alternating copolymers showed blue emissions because of the adjusted conjugation lengths; the maximum wavelength was 460 nm for poly{4,4′‐biphenylene‐α‐[4″‐(N,N′‐diphenylamino)diphenyl]vinylene‐alt‐5‐(2′‐ethylhexyloxy)‐2‐methoxybenzene} and 487 nm for poly{4,4′‐biphenylene‐α‐[4″‐(N,N′‐diphenylamino)diphenyl] vinylene‐alt‐9,9‐dihexylfluorene}. The maximum brightness of indium tin oxide/poly(3,4‐ethylene dioxythiophene)/polymer/LiF/Al devices with poly{4,4′‐biphenylene‐α‐[4″‐(N,N′‐diphenylamino)diphenyl]vinylene‐alt‐5‐(2′‐ethylhexyloxy)‐2‐methoxybenzene} or poly{4,4′‐biphenylene‐α‐[4″‐(N,N′‐diphenylamino)diphenyl]vinylene‐alt‐9,9‐dihexylfluorene} as the emitting layer was 250 or 1000 cd/m², respectively. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Polym Sci Part A: Polym Chem 45: 341–347, 2007     

The spectra of nonnegative integer matrices via formal power series

We characterize the possible nonzero spectra of primitive integer matrices (the integer case of Boyle and Handelman's Spectral Conjecture). Characterizations of nonzero spectra of nonnegative matrices over and follow from this result. For the proof of the main theorem we use polynomial matrices to reduce the problem of realizing a candidate spectrum to factoring the polynomial as a product where the 's are polynomials in satisfying some technical conditions and is a formal power series in . To obtain the factorization, we present a hierarchy of estimates on coefficients of power series of the form to ensure nonpositivity in nonzero degree terms.

     

Efficient inverse radiation analysis in a cylindrical geometry using a combined method of hybrid genetic algorithm and finite-difference Newton method

An inverse radiation problem was considered to estimate boundary conditions such as temperature distribution and emissivity in axisymmetric absorbing, emitting, and scattering medium, given the measured incident radiative heat fluxes. The finite-volume method was employed to solve a direct radiative transfer equation for a two-dimensional axisymmetric geometry. Various parameter estimators, such as conjugate-gradient method, hybrid genetic algorithm, and finite-difference Newton method, were employed to solve the inverse problems, while discussing their performances in terms of estimation accuracy and computational efficiency. Based on this, we proposed, as a best inverse analysis tool, a new combined method that adopted the hybrid genetic algorithm as an initial value selector and used the finite-difference Newton method as a parameter estimator.