背压向心汽轮机出口变工况特性数值仿真

背压式向心汽轮机适用于工业蒸汽的余压回收,而该应用场景常因流量不稳定造成汽轮机的出口工况变动,使机组的运行效率受到影响。为了掌握变工况时汽轮机的工作特性,本文使用商用软件ANSYS对背压汽轮机中的向心涡轮进行数值计算,绘制出向心涡轮特性曲线;同时,针对性能较差的小流量工况,文章采用了部分进汽的方式优化涡轮性能,并借助全圆周定常计算论证了部分进汽优化方式在向心汽轮机上的可行性。结果表明,出口压力会对涡轮的通流特性产生较大影响,随着出口总压的减小,流量逐步增大并最终趋于临界值,涡轮整体性能较为理想;但若出口压力持续增大,则涡轮的通流能力变差,其气动效率将急剧下降。采用部分进汽方式调节涡轮性能时,若速比小于0.85,可采用较大部分进汽度及分散进汽方式适当提升输出功;而若速比大于0.85,通道流量始终处于较低水平,此时应通过降低部分进汽度并采用集中进汽的方式可改善流动状态,提升涡轮气动效率。

自循环机匣对高速离心叶轮性能及稳定性影响的研究

本文以某高速离心压气机为研究对象,通过数值模拟的方法,研究了叶轮失稳流场和两种自循环机匣对其性能的影响,以期揭示自循环机匣影响叶轮性能和内部流场的内在机理。研究首先模拟叶轮在实壁机匣下的情景,发现小流量工况下的叶片表面二次流强度明显增大,在叶轮前缘和叶顶泄漏流大量掺混,以至于在分流叶片通道进口出现了大范围堵塞,形成大范围"尾迹区",引起叶片失速。针对上述现象,研究模拟叶轮在两种不同后槽位置的自循环机匣下的情景。采用自循环机匣结构后,最高能使失速裕度提升6%,设计点效率下降0.5%。在小流量工况下,气流主要由主叶片压力面附近流入机匣结构中。有效降低了叶顶泄漏流强度和压力面叶顶通道涡强度,同时还增加叶轮进口的流量,减小叶轮进口的气流攻角,降低了流动损失。

Target inhibition of caspase-8 alleviates brain damage after subarachnoid hemorrhage

Caspase-8 plays an important role in the mediation of inflammation and the effect of its role in subarachnoid hemorrhage remains elusive.The nucleotide-binding oligomerization domain-like receptor protein 3 inflammasome has been postulated to mediate inflammation during SAH.The aim of the present study was to investigate the effects of caspase-8 inhibition on SAH injury and further elucidate the molecular mechanisms.In this study,a subarachnoid hemorrhage model was established by endovascular perforation process in adult male Sprague-Dawley rats.Z-IETD-FMK(0.5,1,2 mg/kg;an inhibitor of caspase-8)was delivered via intravenous(tail vein)injection immediately after subarachnoid hemorrhage.After 12 hours of subarachnoid hemorrhage,western blot assay showed that the expression of cleaved caspase-8 was significantly increased at 12 hours,peaked at 24 hours,and then decreased at 72 hours after subarachnoid hemorrhage.Immunofluorescence staining demonstrated that caspase-8 was expressed in microglia after subarachnoid hemorrhage.Z-IETDFMK significantly improved neurological deficits and reduced brain water content 24 hours after subarachnoid hemorrhage.The Morris water maze and rotarod test confirmed that Z-IETD-FMK significantly improved spatial learning and memory abilities and motor coordination at 21–27 days after subarachnoid hemorrhage.Furthermore,inhibition of caspase-8 activation reduced the expression of pyrin domain-containing 3,caspase-1,and interleukin-1βafter subarachnoid hemorrhage.In conclusion,our findings suggest that caspase-8 inhibition alleviates subarachnoid hemorrhage-induced brain injuries by suppressing inflammation.The study was approved by the Institutional Animal Ethics Committee of the First Affiliated Hospital,School of Medicine,Zhejiang University,China(approval No.2016-193)on February 25,2016.

Trimming self-intersections in swept volume solid modeling

Swept volume solid modeling has been applied to many areas such as NC machining simulation and verification, robot workspace analysis, collision detection, and CAD. But self-intersections continue to be a challenging problem in the boundary representation of swept volume solids. A novel algorithm is presented in this paper to trim self-intersection regions in swept volume solids modeling. This trimming algorithm consists of two major steps: (1) roughly detecting self-intersection regions by checking intersections or overlapping of the envelop profiles; (2) splitting the whole envelop surfaces of the swept volume solid into separate non-self-intersecting patches to trim global self-intersections, and to trim local self-intersections, dividing local self-intersecting regions into patches and replacing self-intersecting patches with non-self-intersecting ones. Examples show that our algorithm is efficient and robust.

Reducing host aldose reductase activity promotes neuronal differentiation of transplanted neural stem cells at spinal cord injury sites and facilitates locomotion recovery

Neural stem cell(NSC)transplantation is a promising strategy for replacing lost neurons following spinal cord injury.However,the survival and differentiation of transplanted NSCs is limited,possibly owing to the neurotoxic inflammatory microenvironment.Because of the important role of glucose metabolism in M1/M2 polarization of microglia/macrophages,we hypothesized that altering the phenotype of microglia/macrophages by regulating the activity of aldose reductase(AR),a key enzyme in the polyol pathway of glucose metabolism,would provide a more beneficial microenvironment for NSC survival and differentiation.Here,we reveal that inhibition of host AR promoted the polarization of microglia/macrophages toward the M2 phenotype in lesioned spinal cord injuries.M2 macrophages promoted the differentiation of NSCs into neurons in vitro.Transplantation of NSCs into injured spinal cords either deficient in AR or treated with the AR inhibitor sorbinil promoted the survival and neuronal differentiation of NSCs at the injured spinal cord site and contributed to locomotor functional recovery.Our findings suggest that inhibition of host AR activity is beneficial in enhancing the survival and neuronal differentiation of transplanted NSCs and shows potential as a treatment of spinal cord injury.

Mesh sharpening via normal filtering

We present a robust mesh sharpening approach to reconstructing sharp features from blended or chamfered features, even with noise and aliasing errors. Feature regions were first recognized via normal variation according to the user's input, and then normal filtering was applied to faces of feature regions. Finally, the vertices of the feature region were gradually updated based on new face normals using a least-squares error criterion. Experimental results demonstrate that the method is effective and robust in sharpening meshes.