Natural light illumination system.

In recent years, green energy has undergone a lot of development and has been the subject of many applications. Many research studies have focused on illumination with sunlight as a means of saving energy and creating healthy lighting. Natural light illumination systems have collecting, transmitting, and lighting elements. Today, most daylight collectors use dynamic concentrators; these include Sun tracking systems. However, this design is too expensive to be cost effective. To create a low-cost collector that can be easily installed on a large building, we have designed a static concentrator, which is prismatic and cascadable, to collect sunlight for indoor illumination. The transmission component uses a large number of optical fibers. Because optical fibers are expensive, this means that most of the cost for the system will be related to transmission. In this paper, we also use a prismatic structure to design an optical coupler for coupling n to 1. With the n-to-1 coupler, the number of optical fibers necessary can be greatly reduced. Although this new natural light illumination system can effectively guide collected sunlight and send it to the basement or to other indoor places for healthy lighting, previously there has been no way to manage the collected sunlight when lighting was not desired. To solve this problem, we have designed an optical switch and a beam splitter to control and separate the transmitted light. When replacing traditional sources, the lighting should have similar characteristics, such as intensity distribution and geometric parameters, to those of traditional artificial sources. We have designed, simulated, and optimized an illumination lightpipe with a dot pattern to redistribute the collected sunlight from the natural light illumination system such that it equals the qualities of a traditional lighting system. We also provide an active lighting module that provides lighting from the natural light illumination system or LED auxiliary sources, depending on circumstances. The system is controlled by a light detector. We used optical simulation tools to design and simulate the efficiency of the active module. Finally, we used the natural light illumination system to provide natural illumination for a traffic tunnel. This system will provide a great number of benefits for the people who use it.

Effects of oxygen-containing functional groups on the synergy effect in pulsed bipolar plasma-catalytic reactions of volatile organic compounds.

This study investigated the synergy effect of three high-concentration oxygenated reactants (4000 ppmv), namely 2-butanol, butanone, and ethyl acetate, in pulsed bipolar plasma-catalytic reactions using prepared La0.7Sr0.3MnO3/mullite and isopentane as the catalyst and control compound, respectively. The intensity of the N I 336.62* peak of in situ optical emission spectra was used as the representative intensity to depict the behavior of plasma discharge. The results demonstrate that the variation in trends of plasma discharge with temperature for the four reactants was similar in terms of rising rates, and differences in functional groups did not significantly affect behavior during the reactions. The selected oxygenated organics were clearly more susceptible to catalysis alone and plasma catalysis than the control compound. The results indicate that the relative polarity of oxygenated reactants is a more crucial factor in plasma catalysis than their dielectric constant and ionization potential. A synergy quantitative index (Λ X ) and synergy factor (Ψ X ) were defined to characterize the synergistic behavior of plasma catalysis. The variation of Λ X with conversion X demonstrates that plasma dissociation was dominant at low conversion rates, and catalysis was dominant at high conversion rates in the plasma-catalytic reaction. The order of Ψ X values was opposite to that of relative polarities for the reactants. Overall, the plasma-catalytic reaction was construed as the combination of plasma dissociation and synergistic catalysis. Ψ X was introduced into synergistic catalysis to establish a theoretical formula for the plasma-catalytic reaction. This theoretical formula was proven to be accurate by comparing experimental and theoretical results, and it successfully predicted the conversion-temperature curve of plasma catalysis.

Odorant stimulation enhances survival of olfactory sensory neurons via MAPK and CREB.

Olfactory sensory neurons (OSNs) can be sensitized to odorants by repeated exposure, suggesting that an animal's responsiveness to olfactory cues can be enhanced at the initial stage of detection. However, because OSNs undergo a regular cycle of apoptosis and replacement by ostensibly naive, precursor-derived neurons, the advantage of sensitization would be lost in the absence of a mechanism for odorant-enhanced survival of OSNs. Using recombinant adenoviruses in conjunction with surgical and electrophysiological techniques, we monitored OSN survival and function in vivo and find that odorant exposure selectively rescues populations of OSNs from apoptosis. We further demonstrate that odorant stimuli rescue OSNs in a cAMP-dependent manner by activating the MAPK/CREB-dependent transcriptional pathway, possibly as a result of expression of Bcl-2.