Direct Capillary Nanofiltration (Direct CNF) is a new technique used for surface water and wastewater treatment in one step without pre-treatment. The CNF membrane module combines the favourable cleaning properties of capillary ultrafiltration membranes with the favourable separation properties of nanofiltration membranes in terms of removal of DOC, colour, bacteria, viruses and pesticides. Dir...

A Pseudo-Boolean (PB) constraint is a linear arithmetic constraint over Boolean variables. PB constraints are and widely used in declarative languages for expressing NP-hard search problems. While there are solvers for sets of PB constraints, there are also reasons to be interested in transforming these to propositional CNF formulas, and a number of methods for doing this have been reported. We...

This study aims to establish the corneal nerve fiber (CNF) morphological alterations in a large cohort of type 2 diabetic patients and to investigate the association between the bead size, a novel parameter representing composite of accumulated mitochondria, glycogen particles, and vesicles in CNF, and the neurophysiological dysfunctions of the peripheral nerves. 162 type 2 diabetic patients an...

A recent and effective approach to probabilistic inference calls for reducing the problem to one of weighted model counting (WMC) on a propositional knowledge base. Specifically, the approach calls for encoding the probabilistic model, typically a Bayesian network, as a propositional knowledge base in conjunctive normal form (CNF) with weights associated to each model according to the network p...

Modern conflict-driven clause learning (CDCL) SAT solvers are very good in solving conjunctive normal form (CNF) formulas. However, some application problems involve lots of parity (xor) constraints which are not necessarily efficiently handled if translated into CNF. This paper studies solving CNF formulas augmented with xor-clauses in the DPLL(XOR) framework where a CDCL SAT solver is coupled...

A highly aligned pattern of carbon nanofibers (CNF) on polycarbonate urethane (PCU) for tissue engineering applications was created by placing a CNF-ethanol solution in 30 microm width copper grid grooves on top of PCU. In vitro results provided the first evidence that fibroblasts and vascular smooth muscle cells selectively adhered to the PCU regions. However, endothelial cells did not display...

The enteropathogenic role of cytotoxic necrotizing factor (CNF)-producing Escherichia coli was investigated by searching cnf genes among 2074 isolates from 200 children with and 200 without acute diarrhea in Brazil. Fourteen (7%) cases versus 10 (5%) control children carried at least one cnf positive isolate (P = 0.50) and most isolates expressed CNF type 1. DNA sequences of virulence factors o...

Conventionally, the photon sieve (PS) was made of chrome-coated fused silica and quartz plates. However, plates have a size limitation due to their weight fragility. A membrane PS is attractive since it lightweight, large size, flexibility deployable. This paper demonstrates new concept based on cellulose nanofiber (CNF). The CNF-based (CNF-PS) transparent, flexible, has high strength toughness...

Bone regeneration required suitable scaffolding materials to support the proliferation and osteogenic differentiation of bone-related cells. In this study, a kind of hybridized nanofibrous scaffold material (CNF/BG) was prepared by incorporating bioactive glass (BG) nanoparticles into carbon nanofibers (CNF) via the combination of BG sol-gel and polyacrylonitrile (PAN) electrospinning, followed...

Carbon nanofiber (CNF)/resole phenolic resin (Hitco 134A) composites exhibited very large increases of bending storage modulus above the glass transition temperature and had higher glass transition temperatures with increasing CNF weight percentage. Small angle neutron scattering (SANS) from dilute suspensions of surface-oxidized CNF in D2O exhibited a Guinier plateau in the q range examined, i...