BACKGROUND Measures to improve bird performance have been sought due to the imminent phase out of in-feed antibiotics in poultry and continued demand for higher poultry feeding efficiency. Increasing grain particle size and dietary fibre may improve gizzard function, digestive efficiency and nutrient absorption. This study was conducted to evaluate the effect increased particle size of corn and...

Particle size fractions, varying from 1.6 to 0.1 mm, were separated from samples of municipal solid waste (MSW) compost. Several physical and chemical parameters of the samples with different particle sizes were measured. The results indicated particle size fractionation changed the physical properties and chemical component distribution of compost. Bulk density of the compost increased as part...

Spatially distributed problems are often approximately modeled in terms of partial differential equations (PDEs) for appropriate coarse-grained quantities (e.g., concentrations). The derivation of accurate such PDEs starting from finer scale, atomistic models, and using suitable averaging is often a challenging task; approximate PDEs are typically obtained through mathematical closure procedure...

We present a particle filter construction for a system that exhibits time-scale separation. The separation of time-scales allows two simplifications that we exploit: i) The use of the averaging principle for the dimensional reduction of the system needed to solve for each particle and ii) the factorization of the transition probability which allows the Rao-Blackwellization of the filtering step...

The Multi-Level Multi-Domain (MLMD) method is a semi-implicit adaptive method for Particle-In-Cell plasma simulations. It has been demonstrated in the past in simulations of Maxwellian plasmas, electrostatic and electromagnetic instabilities, plasma expansion in vacuum, magnetic reconnection [1, 2, 3]. In multiple occasions, it has been commented on the coupling between the coarse and the refin...

The US Environmental Protection Agency is currently assessing the need for a National Ambient Air Quality Standard for the coarse fraction of particulate material (PMCF), specifically, the fraction of particulate matter between 2.5 and 10 μm in aerodynamic equivalent diameter. EPA is primarily relying on epidemiological studies that examine the possible health effects of PMCF to reach a decisio...

We present a bottom-up coarse-graining procedure to construct mesoscopic force fields directly from microscopic dynamics. By grouping many bonded atoms in the molecular dynamics (MD) system into a single cluster, we compute both the conservative and non-conservative interactions between neighboring clusters. In particular, we perform MD simulations of polymer melts to provide microscopic trajec...

Coarse-grained (CG) models provide a computationally efficient means to study biomolecular and other soft matter processes involving large numbers of atoms correlated over distance scales of many covalent bond lengths and long time scales. Variational methods based on information from simulations of finer-grained (e.g., all-atom) models, for example the multiscale coarse-graining (MS-CG) and re...

A 112-day trial was carried out to evaluate the effect of dietary calcium level and limestone particle size on the egg quality of 288 HyLine Brown semi-heavy layers, with 83 weeks of age at the beginning of the experiment. A completely randomized experimental design was applied in a 2x3 factorial arrangement, with two dietary calcium levels (3.5 and 4.0%) e three limestone particle size composi...

OBJECTIVES Studies of individual inflammatory responses to exposure to air pollution are few but are important in defining the most sensitive markers in better understanding pathophysiological pathways in the lung. The goal of this study was to assess whether exposure to airborne particles is associated with oxidative stress in an epidemiological setting. METHODS The authors assessed exposure...