ALBERT

Description: The uncertainties during the return trajectory of vertical takeoff and vertical landing reusable launch vehicle weaken the ability of precision landing and make the return process more challenging. This paper is devoted to quantifying the probability uncertainty of return trajectory with uncertain parameters. The uncertainty model of return multi-flight-phase under the uncertainties of initial flight path angle, axial aerodynamic coefficient, and atmospheric density is established using the generalized polynomial chaos expansion method. By parameterizing random uncertainties and introducing random parameters into the uncertainty model, the uncertainty analysis problem of return trajectory is transformed into stochastic trajectory approximation problem. The coefficients of the polynomial basis function are solved by the stochastic collocation method. Then state solutions, statistical properties, and global sensitivity with Sobol index are established based on coefficients. The simulation results show the efficiency and accuracy of this method compared with the Monte Carlo method, the evolution process of main output parameters under random parameters, and relative importance for random parameters. Through the uncertainty analysis of the return trajectory, the robustness of return trajectory can be quantified, which is contributed to improving the safety, reliability, and robustness of recovery and landing mission.

Description: Vegetative filter strips (VFS) can effectively trap sediment in overland flow, but little information is available on its performance in controlling high-concentration sediment and the runoff hydraulics in VFS. Flume experiments were conducted to investigate the sediment deposition, hydraulics of overland flow and their relationships in simulating VFS under a great range of sediment concentrations with four levels of vegetation cover (bare slope and 4, 11 and 17%) and two flow rates (15 and 30 L min −1 ). Sediment concentrations varied from 30 to 400 kg m −3 and slope gradient was 9°. Both the deposited sediment load and deposition efficiency in VFS increased as the vegetation cover increased. Sediment concentration had a positive effect on the deposited load but no effect on deposition efficiency. A lower flow rate corresponded to greater deposition efficiency but had little effect on deposited load. Flow velocities decreased as vegetation cover increased. Sediment concentration had a negative effect on the mean velocity but no effect on surface velocity. Hydraulic resistance increased as the vegetation cover and sediment concentration increased. Sediment deposition efficiency had a much more pronounced relationship with overland flow hydraulics compared with deposited load, especially with the mean flow velocity, and there was a power relationship between them. Flow regime also affected the sediment deposition efficiency, and the efficiency was much higher under subcritical than supercritical flow. The results will be useful for the design of VFS and the control of sediment flowing into rivers in areas with serious soil erosion.

Description: Pupylation, one of the most important posttranslational modifications of proteins, typically takes place when prokaryotic ubiquitin-like protein (Pup) is attached to specific lysine residues on a target protein. Identification of pupylation substrates and their corresponding sites will facilitate the understanding of the molecular mechanism of pupylation. Comparing with the labor-intensive and time-consuming experiment approaches, computational prediction of pupylation sites is much desirable for their convenience and fast speed. In this study, a new bioinformatics tool named EnsemblePup was developed that used an ensemble of support vector machine classifiers to predict pupylation sites. The highlight of EnsemblePup was to utilize the Bi-profile Bayes feature extraction as the encoding scheme. The performance of EnsemblePup was measured with a sensitivity of 79.49%, a specificity of 82.35%, an accuracy of 85.43%, and a Matthews correlation coefficient of 0.617 using the 5-fold cross validation on the training dataset. When compared with other existing methods on a benchmark dataset, the EnsemblePup provided better predictive performance, with a sensitivity of 80.00%, a specificity of 83.33%, an accuracy of 82.00%, and a Matthews correlation coefficient of 0.629. The experimental results suggested that EnsemblePup presented here might be useful to identify and annotate potential pupylation sites in proteins of interest. A web server for predicting pupylation sites was developed.

Description: This paper proposes a modified artificial bee colony optimizer (MABC) by combining bee-to-bee communication pattern and multipopulation cooperative mechanism. In the bee-to-bee communication model, with the enhanced information exchange strategy, individuals can share more information from the elites through the Von Neumann topology. With the multipopulation cooperative mechanism, the hierarchical colony with different topologies can be structured, which can maintain diversity of the whole community. The experimental results on comparing the MABC to several successful EA and SI algorithms on a set of benchmarks demonstrated the advantage of the MABC algorithm. Furthermore, we employed the MABC algorithm to resolve the multilevel image segmentation problem. Experimental results of the new method on a variety of images demonstrated the performance superiority of the proposed algorithm.

Description: A chiral helical coordination polymer [Ag(pmta)] n ( 1 ) was prepared by the reaction of the asymmetric organic spacer 2-pyrimidylthioacetic acid (Hpmta) with silver(I) acetate. Complex 1 has a hetero-chiral coaxial helical structure, which is further extended into a 2D network structure by various supramolecular interactions. Furthermore, complex 1 exhibits strong fluorescence emission in the solid state and modest power second-harmonic-generation (SHG) efficiency at room temperature.

Description: Extended discrete shearlet provides a directional multiresolution decomposition. It has been mathematically shown that extended discrete shearlet is a more efficient representation for the signals containing distributed discontinuities such as edges, compared to discrete wavelet. Multiresolution analyses such as curvelet and ridgelet share similar properties, yet their directional representations are significantly different from that of extended discrete shearlet. Taking advantage of the unique properties of directional representation of extended discrete shearlet, we develop an image watermark algorithm based on the largest information entropy. In proposed algorithm, firstly, 1-level extended discrete shearlet transform decomposes the test image into directional components on horizontal cone; each directional component reflects directional features and textured features differently. Next, the directional component whose information entropy is the highest is selected to carry watermark. Compared with related algorithms based on DWT and DCT, the proposed algorithm tends to obtain preferable invisibility when it is robust against common attacks.

Description: Fine particles (PM2.5) were collected using filter-based high-volume samplers during summer-winter 2008 at a rural site in the central Pearl River Delta (PRD), south China, to determine typical secondary organic aerosol (SOA) tracers from significant biogenic (isoprene, monoterpenes, and sesquiterpenes) and anthropogenic (aromatics) precursors. Average isoprene SOA tracers were significantly higher during summer (126 ng m−3) than during fall-winter (25.1 ng m−3), owing largely to the higher isoprene emission and reaction rates in summer. Average monoterpene SOA tracers during summer (11.6 ng m−3) and fall-winter (16.4 ng m−3) showed much less difference compared to isoprene SOA tracers, probably resulting from the counteracting effects of temperature on the precursor emission/tracer formation and on gas/particle partitioning. The concentrations of the aromatics' SOA tracer (2,3-dihydroxy-4-oxopentanoic acid) ranged from 1.70 to 52.0 ng m−3 with an average of 15.1 ng m−3, which was the highest reported in ambient air. The secondary organic carbon (SOC) estimated by the SOA-tracer method averaged 3.07 μg C m−3 in summer and 2.00 μg C m−3 in fall-winter, contributing 38.4% and 8.7% to OC, respectively. During summer, aromatics-SOC and isoprene-SOC reached 2.25 ± 1.5 μg C m−3 and 0.64 ± 0.7 μg C m−3 and accounted for 76% and 18% of the estimated SOC, respectively, while during fall-winter, aromatics-SOC (1.64 ± 1.4 μg C m−3) was dominant with a share of 79% in total estimated SOC. These results indicated that anthropogenic aromatics were dominant SOC precursors in the highly industrialized and urbanized PRD region. During summer, SOC levels estimated by elemental carbon (EC) tracer method were not only consistent with but also correlated well with those by SOA-tracer method. During fall-winter, however, SOC by SOA-tracer method was only about one third of that by EC-tracer method. Their gaps were significantly correlated with the biomass burning tracer levoglucosan, indicating that input from biomass burning emission with very high ratios of OC/EC during fall-winter would result in an overestimate of SOC by EC-tracer method. Therefore cautions should be taken when estimating SOC by EC-tracer method, especially when biomass burning exhibits significant influences.

Description: A chiral helical coordination polymer [Ag(pmta)] n ( 1 ) was prepared by the reaction of the asymmetric organic spacer 2-pyrimidylthioacetic acid (Hpmta) with silver(I) acetate. Complex 1 has a hetero-chiral coaxial helical structure, which is further extended into a 2D network structure by various supramolecular interactions. Furthermore, complex 1 exhibits strong fluorescence emission in the solid state and modest power second-harmonic-generation (SHG) efficiency at room temperature.

Description: There is a broad consensus that the Solonker Suture Zone marks the final closure of the Paleo-Asian Ocean, which led to the formation of the eastern segment of the Central Asian Orogenic Belt. However, when and how the final closure occurred still remains controversial. To address this issue, provenance analysis of Permian sedimentary rocks of arc basins along the Xar Moron River was carried out. Geochemical analysis revealed a close relationship between the sedimentary and volcanic rock suite in the study region suggesting short transport distances and a complex convergent arc setting. Detrital zircon U-Pb analysis identified two major age provenances: (1) the Precambrian basement of the North China Craton (~2497 Ma and ~1844 Ma), and (2) the Paleozoic Southern Accretionary Orogen along the northern margin of North China (~436 Ma and ~269 Ma). The present locations of identified age provenances indicate southward subduction beneath the northern margin of North China. A comparison of the youngest age population in the sedimentary rocks with U-Pb ages obtained for subduction-related volcanic rocks implies that the Solonker Suture Zone formed from the Late Permian to Early Triassic. The results of our study advocate a complex Permian arc system which was probably similar to present-day Southeast Asia.

Description: N-Doped TiO2 nanocrystals were synthesized via a simple sonochemical route, using titanium tetrachloride, aqueous ammonia, and urea as starting materials. The as-synthesized samples were characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), field emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM) equipped with an energy dispersion X-ray spectrometer (EDS), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), UV-vis diffuse reflection spectroscopy, Raman spectroscopy, and nitrogen adsorption-desorption isotherms. The results of TEM and nitrogen adsorption-desorption showed that the average size and specific surface area of the as-synthesized nanocrystals are 10 nm and 107.2 m2/g, respectively. Raman spectral characterization combined with the results of XRD and EDS revealed that N dopant ions were successfully doped into TiO2. Compared with pure TiO2, the adsorption band edge of N-doped TiO2 samples exhibited an obvious red shift to visible region. The photocatalytic activities were evaluated by the degradation of Rhodamine B (RhB) under visible light, and the results showed that the N-doped TiO2 sample synthesized by an optimal amount of urea exhibited excellent photocatalytic activity due to its special mesoporous structure and the incorporation of nitrogen dopant ions.