One strategy to decrease the amount of oxides of nitrogen formed and emitted from certain combustion devices, such as the internal combustion engine, is to recirculate and introduce a portion of the unburned product gases with the air and fuel. The effect of the re-circulated gases is to decrease the maximum temperatures in the flame zone, and hence decrease NOx formation. However, dilution of ...

An adaptive approach for coupling detailed kinetics with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has been formulated to permit reactive flow simulations with improved computational efficiency. The approach makes use of a set of reduced mechanisms, each of which has been developed to reproduce the mixture kinetics under well-characterized thermo-chemical conditions. In the present implementation, the...

Micro-cogeneration with locally produced biogas from waste is a proven technique for supporting the decarbonization process. However, strongly variable composition of can make its use in internal combustion engines quite challenging. Dual-fuel offer advantages over conventional SI and diesel engines, but there are still issues to be addressed, such as low-load thermodynamic efficiency nitrogen ...

Background. Although the benchmark in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis remains methotrexate, only 70% of patients respond. Thus, there is a need for predictive biomarkers. This study planned to evaluate serum levels of myeloid progenitor inhibitory factor-1 (MPIF-1) and monocyte chemoattractant protein 2 (MCP-2)-as biomarkers. Methods. Patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) having high di...

Hindbrain projections of oxytocin neurons in the parvocellular paraventricular nucleus (pPVN) are hypothesized to transmit leptin signaling from the hypothalamus to the nucleus of the solitary tract (NTS), where satiety signals from the gastrointestinal tract are received. Using immunocytochemistry, we found that an anorectic dose of leptin administered into the third ventricle (3V) increased t...

The 3v method has been proven to be very useful for determining the thermal conductivity of thin films and their substrates. Several simplifications are often used in determining the thermal conductivity of the films based on the experimentally measured 3v signal. These simplifications, however, have limited range of applicability. In this work, we present a detailed analysis and mathematical m...

Kiva is an online philanthropic crowdsourcing platform that connects lenders with the borrowers in the third world. It is via the stories conveyed by the loan descriptions that the lenders get to know the borrowers and make the decision to help. In this project we study how the loan descriptions affect the funding speed of the loans. We train recurrent neural networks and long short-term memory...

Multi-agent path-finding (MAPF) is important for applications such as the kind of warehousing done by Kiva systems. Solving the problem optimally is NP-hard, yet finding lowcost solutions is important. Bounded-suboptimal MAPF algorithms, such as enhanced conflict-based search (ECBS), often do not perform well in warehousing domains with many agents. We therefore develop bounded-suboptimal MAPF ...

Regulation of phosphate (Pi) reabsorption occurs through the up- and downregulation of the renal type-II sodium Pi cotransporters (NaPi-2). Recently, renal NaPi2-type expression has been identified in areas of the brain. The present study determined whether brain NaPi-2 is regulated by dietary Pi and whether the behavioral and renal adaptations to low-dietary Pi are controlled centrally. NaPi-2...