Experimental investigation on the heat transfer characteristics in process of printed circuit boards pyrolysis under nitrogen flow.

Pyrolysis process has many advantages, if integrated in the process of precious metals recovery from scrap printed circuit boards (PCBs). The heat transfer characteristics of PCB during pyrolysis have a significant influence on the pyrolysis efficiency and energy consumption. In order to improve the heat transfer performance and efficiency of energy utilization and reduce the energy costs, a fixed bed pyrolysis experiment device was established and investigated experimentally under high temperature nitrogen flow. The temperature distribution of waste PCB particles layer was measured, and the heat transfer characteristics was investigated. The experimental results indicate that the size of the PCB particle has an obvious effect on the pyrolysis reaction time and the migration rate of pyrolysis. The larger the particle size is, the shorter the pyrolysis reaction time is and the faster the migration rate is. When the square particle sizes are 1.5 cm, 2.5 cm and 3.5 cm wide, the average migration rates of pyrolysis reaction zone along the vertical direction are 0.47 m/h, 0.50 m/h and 0.63 m/h, respectively. Pyrolysis region and pyrolysis state have obvious effects on the temperature rising rate and temperature gradient along vertical direction.

Inhibition of element sulfur and calcium oxide on the formation of PCDD/Fs during co-combustion experiment of municipal solid waste.

In order to investigate the effect of element sulfur (S) and calcium oxide (CaO) on the formation of polychlorinated dibenzo-p-dioxins (PCDDs) and polychlorinated dibenzofurans (PCDFs) during municipal solid waste (MSW) combustion process, MSW was incinerated with S or CaO in a laboratory-scale incinerator and heated in the flow of N2-O2 gas mixture at 800°C. It can be concluded that 25% of oxygen concentration is the best condition for the following inhibitors experiments through a series of oxygen variation experiments. With adding S and CaO in MSW incineration, seventeen kinds of 2, 3, 7, 8-substituted PCDD/Fs congeners were analysed with high-resolution chromatography and mass spectrometry method. The results show that S and CaO obviously suppress PCDD/Fs formation. Comparing inhibition effect of S with that of CaO, the inhibitory effect of S on HpCDD/Fs formation was most remarkable, of around 88.1%; while CaO could inhibit the formation of HxCDD/Fs more evidently than sulfur and the inhibition was 85.1%. PCDFs were the main components of dioxins produced from MSW incineration in the experiments, and S and CaO were unable to change the dominating generation route of PCDD/Fs. S and CaO could mainly consume chlorine sources or weaken the chlorination in the PCDD/Fs formation process to restrain the PCDFs formation, but the inhibition mechanisms were different. In addition, some dioxins or precursors might be decomposed by S and CaO.

Experimental study on the heat transfer characteristics of waste printed circuit boards pyrolysis.

In order to study the appropriate and advanced technology for recycling waste printed circuit boards (PCBs), a fixed bed pyrolysis device with stirring function has been designed and developed. The effect of rotating speed on the temperature distribution and mass change in the pyrolysis process of FR-4 PCB has been analyzed. The heat transfer and pyrolysis characteristics of different granular layers with and without stirring have been investigated. The results indicate that the stirring can change the main way of heat transfer from conduction to convection in the PCB layers. As the increase of rotating speed, the temperature rising rate of material at the bottom of the pyrolysis furnace gradually decreases, while the heating rate is increasing at the upper layer, and the temperature difference between the upper and bottom layers is gradually reduced. When the rotating speed varies from 0r/min to 18r/min, the weight loss of the material increases from 3.97% to 6.76%, and the overall pyrolysis degree is improved. During the pyrolysis process, the material layer can be divided into three zones along the vertical direction, namely complete pyrolysis zone, partial pyrolysis zone and non-pyrolysis zone. As the rotating speed is 0r/min, the thickness of each zones is 6cm, 6cm and 3cm, respectively. However, when the rotating speed is increased to 18r/min, the non-pyrolysis zone disappears, and the thickness of complete pyrolysis zone and partial pyrolysis zone increase to 9cm and 6cm, respectively.

External magnetic field promotes homing of magnetized stem cells following subcutaneous injection.

BACKGROUND: Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) are multipotent stromal cells that have the ability to self-renew and migrate to sites of pathology. In vivo tracking of MSCs provides insights into both, the underlying mechanisms of MSC transformation and their potential as gene delivery vehicles. The aim of our study was to assess the ability of superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles (SPIONs)-labeled Wharton's Jelly of the human umbilical cord-derived MSCs (WJ-MSCs) to carry the green fluorescent protein (GFP) gene to cutaneous injury sites in a murine model. METHODS: WJ-MSCs were isolated from a fresh umbilical cord and were genetically transformed to carry the GFP gene using lentiviral vectors with magnetically labeled SPIONs. The SPIONs/GFP-positive WJ-MSCs expressed multipotent cell markers and demonstrated the potential for osteogenic and adipogenic differentiation. Fifteen skin-injured mice were divided into three groups. Group I was treated with WJ-MSCs, group II with SPIONs/GFP-positive WJ-MSCs, and group III with SPIONs/GFP-positive WJ-MSCs exposed to an external magnetic field (EMF). Magnetic resonance imaging and optical molecular imaging were performed, and images were acquired 1, 2, and 7 days after cell injection. RESULTS: The results showed that GFP could be intensively detected around the wound in vivo 24 h after the cells were injected. Furthermore, we observed an accumulation of WJ-MSCs at the wound site, and EMF exposure increased the speed of cell transport. In conclusion, our study demonstrated that SPIONs/GFP function as cellular probes for monitoring in vivo migration and homing of WJ-MSCs. Moreover, exposure to an EMF can increase the transportation efficiency of SPIONs-labeled WJ-MSCs in vivo. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings could lead to the development of a gene carrier system for the treatment of diseases.

Stereo correspondence with occlusion handling in a symmetric patch-based graph-cuts model.

A novel patch-based correspondence model is presented in this paper. Many segment-based correspondence approaches have been proposed in recent years. Untextured pixels and boundaries of discontinuities are imposed with hard constraints by the discontinuity assumption that large disparity variation only happens at the boundaries of segments in the above approaches. Significant improvements on performance of untextured and discontinuity area have been reported. But, the performance near occlusion is not satisfactory because a segmented region in one image may be only partially visible in the other one. To solve this problem, we utilize the observation that the shared edge of a visible area and an occluded area corresponds to the discontinuity in the other image. So, the proposed model conducts color segmentation on both images first and then a segment in one image is further cut into smaller patches corresponding to the boundaries of segments in the other when it is assigned with a disparity. Different visibility of patches in one segment is allowed. The uniqueness constraint in a segment level is used to compute the occlusions. An energy minimization framework using graph-cuts is proposed to find a global optimal configuration including both disparities and occlusions. Besides, some measurements are taken to make our segment-based algorithm suffer less from violation of the discontinuity assumption. Experimental results have shown superior performance of the proposed approach, especially on occlusions, untextured areas, and near discontinuities.

[Research on automatic recognition system for leucocyte image].

The image segmentation method we use for leucocytes is based on image distance transformation, combining the region and edge approach, taking full advantage of image information. According to the shape, texture and color appearance of cells, we select 22 feature values and measure them. The classifier is designed on the statistical classification. A test for recognizing 831 leucocytes in 560 images shows that the classification accuracy is 96%. Clinical experts confirm this system; for it can automatically recognize leucocytes by pattern recognition technique, and it is demonstrably valid in practice.

Blind image restoration with eigen-face subspace.

Performance of conventional image restoration methods is sensitive to signal-to-noise ratios. For heavily blurred and noisy human facial images, information contained in the eigen-face subspace can be used to compensate for the lost details. The blurred image is decomposed into the eigen-face subspace and then restored with a regularized total constrained least square method. With Generalized cross-validation, a cost function is deduced to include two unknown parameters: the regularization factor and one parameter relevant to point spread function. It is shown that, in minimizing the cost function, the cost function dependence of any one unknown parameter can be separated from the other one, which means the cost function can be considered roughly, depending on single variable in an iterative algorithm. With realistic constraints on the regularized factor, a global minimum for the cost function is achieved to determine the unknown parameters. Experiments are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the new method.