Ethene/norbornene copolymerization by the catalyst system [Me₂Si(3-^tertBuCp)(N^tertBu)]TiCl₂/MAO was investigated in detail at 30°C, 60°C, and 90°C. A mass flow controller was used in this work to obtain kinetic data and investigate temperature\'s effects on activity, norbornene incorporation, copolymerization parameter, microstructure, glass transition temperature, and molar masses were described. High copolymerization values r_E and high alternation are determined. The number of isotactic alternating sequences is much higher than that of the syndiotactic alternating sequences.

MBE growth of ZnS_xSe_1-x thin films on ITO coated glass substrates were carried out using ZnS and Se sources with the substrate temperature ranging from 270°C to 330°C. The XRD θ/2θ spectra resulted from these films indicated that the as-grown polycrystalline ZnS_xSe_1-x thin films had a preferred orientation along the (111) planes. The evaluated crystal sizes as deduced from the FWHM of the XRD layer peaks showed strong growth temperature dependence, with the optimized temperature being about 290°C. Both AFM and TEM measurements of these thin films also indicated a similar growth temperature dependence. High quality ZnS_xSe_1-x thin film grown at the optimized temperature had the smoothest surface with lowest RMS value of 1.2 nm and TEM cross-sectional micrograph showing a well defined columnar structure.

This study of renaturation by dilution and size exclusion chromatography (SEC) addition of urea to improve yield as well as the initial and final protein concentrations showed that although urea decreased the rate of lysozyme refolding, it could suppress protein aggregation to sustain the pathway of correct refolding at high protein concentration; and that there existed an optimum urea concentration in renaturation buffer. Under the above conditions, lysozyme was successfully refolded from initial concentration of up to 40 mg/mL by dilution and 100 mg/mL by SEC, with the yield of the former being more than 40% and that of the latter being 34.8%. Especially, under the condition of 30 min interval time, i.e. τ>2(t_R2-t_R1), the efficiency was increased by 25% and the renaturation buffer could be recycled for SEC refolding in continuous operation of downstream process.

A newly isolated strain EL31410, producing elastase (E.C3.4.4.7) with high elastolytic activity was identified as Bacillus sp. In the medium optimization, it was found that wheat bran and soybean flour hydrosate were the best crude carbon and nitrogen source for enzyme production, respectively. Addition of corn steep flour can affect the bacterium growth and elastase production. A fractional factorial design was applied to study the main factors that affect the enzyme production, and central composite experimental design and response surface methodology were adopted to derive a statistical model for the effect of wheat bran and soybean flour hydrosate on elastase production. The experimental results showed that wheat bran had positive effect but soybean flour hydrosate had negative effect, on enzyme production. An initial concentration of 3.4%(w/v) wheat bran and 9.4%(v/v) soybean flour hydrosate were found to be optimal for enzyme production in batch culture. The time course of elastase production in the optimized medium composition was also described.

This paper presents a two-agent framework to build a natural language query interface for IC information system, focusing more on scope queries in a single English sentence. The first agent, parsing agent, syntactically processes and semantically interprets natural language sentence to construct a fuzzy structured query language (SQL) statement. The second agent, defuzzifying agent, defuzzifies the imprecise part of the fuzzy SQL statement into its equivalent executable precise SQL statement based on fuzzy rules. The first agent can also actively ask the user some necessary questions when it manages to disambiguate the vague retrieval requirements. The adaptive defuzzification approach employed in the defuzzifying agent is discussed in detail. A prototype interface has been implemented to demonstrate the effectiveness.

A color based system using multiple templates was developed and implemented for detecting human faces in color images. The algorithm consists of three image processing steps. The first step is human skin color statistics. Then it separates skin regions from non-skin regions. After that, it locates the frontal human face(s) within the skin regions. In the first step, 250 skin samples from persons of different ethnicities are used to determine the color distribution of human skin in chromatic color space in order to get a chroma chart showing likelihoods of skin colors. This chroma chart is used to generate, from the original color image, a gray scale image whose gray value at a pixel shows its likelihood of representing the skin. The algorithm uses an adaptive thresholding process to achieve the optimal threshold value for dividing the gray scale image into separate skin regions from non skin regions. Finally, multiple face templates matching is used to determine if a given skin region represents a frontal human face or not. Test of the system with more than 400 color images showed that the resulting detection rate was 83%, which is better than most color-based face detection systems. The average speed for face detection is 0.8 second/image (400×300 pixels) on a Pentium 3 (800MHz) PC.

The technique of real-time digital speckle pattern interferometry is proposed to study diffusion of surfactants in hydrogel. The diffusion coefficient is simply and directly determined from the interferograms. An example of diffusion coefficient measurement of surfactant in agarose gel demonstrates the usefulness of the method. The results obtained are compared with the theoretical simulating values.

In order to predict and improve the performance of natural gas/diesel dual fuel engine (DFE), a combustion rate model based on forward neural network was built to study the combustion process of the DFE. The effect of the operating parameters on combustion rate was also studied by means of this model. The study showed that the predicted results were good agreement with the experimental data. It was proved that the developed combustion rate model could be used to successfully predict and optimize the combustion process of dual fuel engine.

Gas-solid two-phase turbulent plane jet is applied to many natural situations and in engineering systems. To predict the particle dispersion in the gas jet is of great importance in industrial applications and in the designing of engineering systems. A large eddy simulation of the two-phase plane jet was conducted to investigate the particle dispersion patterns. The particles with Stokes numbers equal to 0.0028, 0.3, 2.5, 28 (corresponding to particle diameter 1 μm, 10 μm, 30 μm, 100 μm, respectively) in Re=11 300 gas flow were studied. The simulation results of gas phase motion agreed well with previous experimental results. And the simulation results of the solid particles motion showed that particles with different Stokes number have different spatial dispersion; and that particles with intermediate Stokes number have the largest dispersion ratio.

This paper reports research on the effects of variations in injection velocity and permeability on the heat transfer and flow through a highly porous medium between two horizontal parallel plates situated at constant distance with constant suction by the upper plate.Due to this type of variation in injection velocity and in permeability the flow becomes three dimensional.The governing equations are solved by adopting complex variable notations to obtain the expressions for the velocity and temperature field. The skin-friction along the main flow direction and rate of heat transfer are discussed with the help of graphs.

Knowledge of the equilibrium bed-concentration is vital to mathematical modeling of the river-bed deformation associated with suspended load but previous investigations only dealt with the reference concentration of uniform sediment because of difficulties in observation of the bed-concentration. This work is a first attempt to develop a theoretical formula for the equilibrium bed-concentration of any fraction of nonuniform sediment defined at the bed-surface. The formula is based on a stochastic-mechanistic model for the exchange of nonuniform sediment near the bed, and described as a function of incipient motion probability, non-ceasing probability, pick-up probability, and the ratio of the average single-step continuous motion time to static time. Comparison of bed-concentration calculated from the proposed formula with the measured data showed satisfactory agreement, indicating the present formula can be used for solving the differential equation governing the motion of suspended load.

The authors give the solution to the problem of one-dimensional consolidation of double-layered ground with the use of the differential quadrature method. Case studies showed that the computational results for pore-water pressure in soil layer agreed with those of analytical solution; and that in the computational results for the interface of soil layer also agreed with those of the analytical solution except for the small discrepancies during shortly after the start of computation. The advantages of the solution presented in this paper are that compared with the analytical solution, it avoids the cumbersome work in solving the transcendental equation for eigenvalues, and in the case of the Laplace transform solution, it can resolve the precision problem in the numerical solution of long time inverse Laplace transform. Because of the matrix form of the solution in this paper, it is convenient for formulating computational program for engineering practice. The formulas for calculating double-layered ground consolidation may be easily extended to the case of multi-layered soils.

The virtual laminated element method (VLEM) can resolve structural shape optimization problems with a new method. According to the characteristics of VLEM, only some characterized layer thickness values need be defined as design variables instead of boundary node coordinates or some other parameters determining the system boundary. One of the important features of this method is that it is not necessary to regenerate the FE(finite element) grid during the optimization process so as to avoid optimization failures resulting from some distortion grid elements. The thickness distribution in thin plate optimization problems in other studies before is of stepped shape. However, in this paper, a continuous thickness distribution can be obtained after optimization using VLEM, and is more reasonable. Furthermore, an approximate reanalysis method named \"behavior model technique\" can be used to reduce the amount of structural reanalysis. Some typical examples are offered to prove the effectiveness and practicality of the proposed method.

Different classes of first-principle pseudopotentials are compared and various schemes for pseudopotential generation based on norm conservation are discussed in this paper. BHS (Bachelet, Hamann, and Schl¨ter)-scheme and V (Vanderbilt)-modifications are used to derive the KB (Kleinman and Bylander)-pseudopotentials and pseudo wave functions of bismuth. Quality test of pseudopotentials shows that no ghost states occur in the logarithmic derivatives of pseudo wave functions of Bismuth. The obtained bond length of bismuth dimer with this type of pseudopotentials is in good agreement with previous accurately calculated ab initio quantum chemical result.

Various adaptive designs have been proposed and applied to clinical trials, bioassay, psychophysics, etc.Adaptive designs are also useful in high cost engineering trials.More and more people have been paying attention to these design methods. This paper introduces several broad families of designs, such as the play-the-winner rule, randomized play-the-winner rule and its generalization to the multi-arm case, doubly biased coin adaptive design, Markov chain model.

In this study, we examined the expression of inducible nitric oxide synthase (iNOS) and vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) by immunohistochemical staining in 76 tissue sections collected from hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) patients undergoing hepatectomy. Microvascular density (MVD) was determined by counting endothelial cells immunostained using anti-CD34 antibody. We performed DNA-flow cytometric analyses to elucidate the impact of iNOS and VEGF expression on the cell cycle of HCC. Most of the HCC cells that invaded stroma were markedly immunostained by iNOS antibody. The iNOS stain intensity of the liver tissue close to the tumor edge was stronger than that of HCC tissue, and the strongest was the hepatocytes closer to the tumor tissue. However, iNOS expression in 10 normal hepatic samples was undetectable. VEGF positive expression ratio was 84.8% in iNOS positive expression cases, and the ratio was 35.3% in negative cases. There was significant correlation (P=0.000) between iNOS and VEGF expression. Moreover, iNOS expression was significantly associated with bcl-2 and MVD, but without p53 expression. DNA-flow cytometric analyses showed that combined expression of iNOS and VEGF had significant impact on the cell cycle in HCC. PI (Proliferating Index) and SPF (S-phase fraction) in the combined positive expression of iNOS and VEGF group was significantly higher than that in the combined negative group. The present findings suggested that iNOS expression was significantly associated with angiogenesis, bcl-2 and cell proliferation of HCC.

Objectives: During visual stimulation, the elevated metabolism rate will couple with increase of blood flow velocity (BFV) in posterior cerebral artery (PCA). This study with TCD was aimed to investigate whether the coupling might change according to the different vasoneuronal conditions. Methods: Ninety-nine volunteers including 24 hypertension (HT) patients and 2 patients suffering from both HT and diabetes mellitus (DM) were enrolled in this trial. BFV and pulse indexes (PI) in P2 segments of PCA on both sides were monitored during visual stimulation. Results: In all subjects, Mean BFV increased and PI went down in response to visual stimulation. The percentages of changes (ΔV and ΔP) of both mean BFV and PI were larger in young group (<55 years old) than in old one (≥55 years old). There was significant positive correlation between ΔV and ΔP. Multivariated regression analysis did not show HT and DM, but age related to ΔV(ΔP). We did not find significant difference of ΔV(ΔP) between left and right sides. Conclusions: Blood flow velocity in PCA P2 segment increased due to decreased cerebrovascular resistance during visual stimulation and the response weakened with aging of the patient.

Objective: The aims of this research were to purify and identify the 130 kDa (CagA) protein of H. pylori clinical isolate HP97002 and evaluate the relationships between the purified 130 kDa (CagA) protein and gastric diseases. Methods: The procedure for isolating the protein included 6 mol/L guanidine extract, size exclusion chromatography and elusion from gel. Sera of 68 patients with gastric diseases (44 with chronic gastritis, 15 with atrophic gastritis, 7 with peptic ulcer disease, 2 with gastric cancer) were obtained, and the serological response to CagA was studied by Western-blot using the purified protein. Results: The purified protein was 130 kDa and preserved good antigenicity and revealed basic isoelectric point about of 8.1. Among 68 sera, 43 sera could recognize the purified protein associated with chronic gastritis 47.7% (21/44),atrophic gastritis 86.7% (13/15), peptic ulcer disease 100% (7/7),gastric cancer 100% (2/2). Compared with each other, the difference was significant (χ²=13.327, P=0.004), and 130 kDa (CagA) protein was associated with severe gastric diseases (r_s=0.442, P=0.001). Conclusion: The 130 kDa (CagA) protein was associated with severe gastric diseases.

The purpose of this study is to gain understanding of the relationship between ejaculation and serum testosterone level in men. The serum testosterone concentrations of 28 volunteers were investigated daily during abstinence periods after ejaculation for two phases. The authors found that the fluctuations of testosterone levels from the 2nd to 5th day of abstinence were minimal. On the 7th day of abstinence, however, a clear peak of serum testosterone appeared, reaching 145.7% of the baseline (P<0.01). No regular fluctuation was observed following continuous abstinence after the peak. Ejaculation is the precondition and beginning of the special periodic serum testosterone level variations, which would not occur without ejaculation. The results showed that ejaculation-caused variations were characterized by a peak on the 7th day of abstinence; and that the effective time of an ejaculation is 7 days minimum. These data are the first to document the phenomenon of the periodic change in serum testosterone level; the correlation between ejaculation and periodic change in the serum testosterone level, and the pattern and characteristics of the periodic change.