In routine mobile A/C compressor testing, Secondary Refrigerant Calorimetry and the First Law of Thermodynamics are employed in the determination of calorimeter primary mass flow rate of volatile refrigerants. An energy balance is performed on the secondary refrigerant calorimeter (SRC) to yield the primary system mass flow rate. This term is the ratio of energy transferred as heat into the SRC...

In this report, we discuss our progress on nonlinear systems analysis. In the past year, we have refined the use of conventional simulation along with semidefinite and polynomial optimization to discover Lyapunov functions which provably certify region-of-attraction (ROA) estimation. Other system properties, such as induced-gain, can also be estimated, with guaranteed bounds, in this manner. Fo...

[1] TheMErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging (MESSENGER) spacecraft at Mercury and the Cassini spacecraft at Saturn provide us with orbiters around planets at more diverse heliocentric distances than ever before. The dramatically different solar wind conditions at these two planets should mean that Mercury’s bow shock is considerably weaker (lower Mach numbers) than Satu...

Wrist fracture is not only one of the most common osteoporotic fractures but also a predictor of future fractures at other sites. Wrist bone mineral density (BMD) is an important determinant of wrist fracture risk, with high heritability. Specific genes underlying wrist BMD variation are largely unknown. Most published genome-wide association studies (GWASs) have focused only on a few top-ranki...

BACKGROUND HIV transmission risk among non-injection drug users is high due to the co-occurrence of drug use and sexual risk behaviors. The purpose of the current study was to identify patterns of drug use among polysubstance users within a high HIV prevalence population. METHODS The study sample included 409 substance users from the Pretoria region of South Africa. Substances used by 20% or ...

BACKGROUND An important role for synovial pathology in the initiation and progression of knee osteoarthritis has been emphasised recently. This study aimed to examine whether ultrasonography-detected synovial changes associate with knee pain (KP) in a community population. METHODS A case-control study was conducted to compare people with early KP (n = 298), established KP (n = 100) or no KP (...

The binding of divalent copper ions to the full-length recombinant murine prion protein PrP23-231 at neutral pH was studied using vibrational Raman optical activity (ROA) and ultraviolet circular dichroism (UV CD). The effect of the Cu2+ ions on PrP structure depends on whether they are added after refolding of the protein in water or are present during the refolding process. In the first case ...

Determination of the absolute handedness, known as absolute configuration (AC), of chiral molecules is an important step in any field related to chirality, especially in the pharmaceutical industry. Vibrational optical activity (VOA) has become a powerful tool for the determination of the AC of chiral molecules in the solution state after nearly forty years of evolution. VOA offers a novel alte...

BACKGROUND Knee injuries can lead to radiographic osteoarthritis (ROA). Injuries may be "specific" (SI) including ligament or meniscal tears or patellar trauma, or "nonspecific" (NSI). Our objective is to understand the effect of knee NSI on ROA incidence and progression. METHODS 163 people (sample-weighted for population representativeness) aged 40+ with history of knee pain had radiographs ...

Combining different knowledge representation languages is one of the main topics in Qualitative Spatial Reasoning (QSR). Existing languages are generally incomparable in terms of expressive power; as such, their combination compensates each other’s representational deficiencies, and is seen as an answer to the emerging demand from real applications, such as Geographical Information Systems (GIS...