It was expected that there would be a relationship between plant density and arrangement within soybean plantations and ground beetles due to changes of abiotic habitat conditions. The aim of this study was to determinate the effect of different plant arrangements of soybean plants on the abundance and species diversity of ground beetles (Coleoptera, Carabidae). The studies were conducted from 2015 to 2017 at the Experimental Research Station, Wrocław, Poland. The occurrence of beetles was examined on soybeans, growing in four different treatments: row spacing of 15 cm or 30 cm, and seeding density of 50 or 90 seeds per m2. The experiment was conducted in a split-plot design in four replicates. Ground beetles were collected with 16 pitfall traps, with one trap in the middle part of each plot. The obtained results show that the general number of ground beetles was similar between the treatments. Some minor effects were found in species number, which was higher in the lower row spacing treatment. Only less abundant species were significantly affected. The most abundant species in all years and treatments were Pseudoophonus rufipes, Harpalus affinis, Calathus fuscipes and Pterostichus melanarius. The abundance of the above-listed common ground beetle species did not differ significantly between treatments.

Nowadays, Aluminium (Al) based hybrid surface composites are amongst the fastest developing advanced materials used for structural applications. Friction Stir Processing (FSP) has emerged as a clean and flexible solid-state surface composites fabrication technique. Intensive research in this field resulted in numerous research output; which hinders in finding relevant meta-data for further research with objectivity. In order to facilitate this research need, present article summarizes current state of the art and advances in aluminium based hybrid surface composites fabrication by FSP with in-situ and ex-situ approach. Reported literature were read and systematically categorized to show impacts of different types of reinforcements, deposition techniques, hybrid reinforcement ratio and FSP machine parameters on microstructures, mechanical and tribological characteristics of different Al alloys. Challenges and opportunities in this field have been summarized at the end, which will be beneficial to researchers working on solid state FSP technique.

This paper focuses on automatic locking of tracking filters used in optical frequency transfer systems. General concept of such a system is briefly described and the problems with its automatic startup, originating in the use of the analog phase locked loop to filter weak, received signal, are discussed. A supervisory circuitry and algorithm to solve these problems is proposed. The frequency of the signal to be filtered is measured indirectly and the output frequency of the tracking filter is monitored. In the case of lack of synchronism (i:e: after the startup) a significant difference of these frequencies is measured and the supervisory algorithm forces the filter to tune into the right frequency and then allows it to synchronize. A system with the proposed solution was implemented and tested experimentally on a fiber optic link with high attenuation and multiple optical connectors. Transient signals during locking were recorded to investigate the system’s behavior in real environment. The system was evaluated in the link causing synchronization losses every 17 min on average. During measurements over 3 days, the whole system was synchronized for over 99.98% of time despite these difficult conditions.

The concept of a hybrid scheme with connection of SIDH and ECDH is nowadays very popular. In hardware implementations it is convenient to use a classical key exchange algorithm, which is based on the same finite field as SIDH. Most frequently used hybrid scheme is SIDH-ECDH. On the other hand, using the same field as in SIDH, one can construct schemes over Fpn, like Diffie-Hellman or XTR scheme, whose security is based on the discrete logarithm problem. In this paper, idea of such schemes will be presented. The security of schemes, which are based on the discrete logarithm problem over fields Fp; Fp2 ; Fp4 ; Fp6 and Fp8 , for primes p used in SIDH, will be analyzed. At the end, the propositions of practical applications of these schemes will be presented.

The fracture and fragmentation of concrete under static and dynamic loads are studied. The uniaxial compressive strength test is employed to study the concrete behavior under static loads while the split Hopkinson pressure bar is used to study the dynamic behavior of the concrete under static loads. The theories for acquiring the stress, strain and strain rate of the concrete in the dynamic test by Hopkinson pressure bar has been introduced. The fracture patterns of the concrete in the uniaxial compressive test have been obtained and the static concrete compressive strengths have been calculated. The fracture patterns of the concrete in the uniaxial compressive test have been obtained and the static concrete compressive strengths have been calculated. The fracture and fragmentation of the specimen under dynamic loads have been acquired and the stress-strain curves of concrete under various impact loads are obtained. The stress-strain curve indicates a typical brittle material failure process which includes existing micro-fracture closure stage, linear-elastic stage, nonlinear-elastic stage, and post-failure stages. The influence of the loading rate for the compressive strength of the concrete has compared. Compared with the concrete under static loads, the dynamic loads can produce more fractures and fragments. The concrete strength is influenced by the strain rate and the strength increases almost linearly with the increase of the strain rate.

Pinnipeds were monitored in Admiralty Bay between 1988 and 1992. No particular trends during this period were found, but seasonal changes in each are distinct. It is suggested that the phenology of pinnipeds and that of penguins ensures low competition for food between these groups.

This study attempted to examine the impacts of academic locus of control and metacognitive awareness on the academic adjustment of the student participants. The convenient sampling was applied to select the sample of 368 participants comprising 246 internals with age ranging from 17 to 28 years (M = 20.52, SD = 2.10) and 122 externals with age spanning from 17 to 28 years (M = 20.57, SD = 2.08). The findings indicated that there were significant differences in the various dimensions of metacognition, academic lifestyle and academic achievement of the internals and externals except for academic motivation and overall academic adjustment. There were significant gender differences in declarative knowledge, procedural knowledge, conditional knowledge, planning, information management, monitoring, evaluation and overall metacognitive awareness. Likewise, the internals and externals differed significantly in their mean scores of declarative knowledge, procedural knowledge, conditional knowledge, planning, information management, monitoring, debugging, evaluation and overall metacognitive awareness, academic lifestyle and academic achievement. The significant positive correlations existed between the scores of metacognitive awareness and academic adjustment. It was evident that the internal academic locus of control and metacognitive awareness were significant predictors of academic adjustment of the students. The findings have been discussed in the light of recent findings of the field. The findings of the study have significant implications to understand the academic success and adjustment of the students and thus, relevant for teachers, educationists, policy makers and parents. The future directions for the researchers and limitations of the study have also been discussed.

Anthracnose disease caused by Colletotrichum lindemuthianum (Sacc. and Magnus) Lams-Scrib is one of the most devastating seed-borne diseases of common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.). In the present study, we evaluated the antifungal activity of Bunium persicum essential oil (EO) and its main constituents on mycelial growth, sporulation and spore germination inhibition of C. lindemuthianum. The main objective of this study was to investigate the effect of EO and its main constituents on decreasing the activity of cell wall degrading enzymes (CWDEs) produced by C. lindemuthianum, which are associated with disease progress. Also, the effects of seed treatment and foliar application of EO and its main constituent, cuminaldehyde, on anthracnose disease severity was investigated. The essential oil of B. persicum, was obtained by using a clevenger apparatus and its major constituents were identified by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS). The EO was characterized by the presence of major compounds such as cuminaldehyde (37.7%), γ-terpinene (17.1%) and β-pinene (15.4%), which indicated antifungal effects against C. lindemuthianum. This pathogen did not grow in the presence of EO, cuminaldehyde and γ-terpinene, β-pinene at 1,500; 1,010 and 1,835 ppm concentrations, respectively. Also, sporulation and spore germination of C. lindemuthianum was completely inhibited by EO and cuminaldehyde. Synergistic effects of the main constituents showed that combing γ-terpinene with cuminaldehyde induced a synergistic activity against C. lindemuthianum and in combination with β-pinene caused an additive effect. Activities of pectinase, cellulase and xylanase, as main CWDEs, were decreased by EO and its main constituents at low concentration without affecting mycelial growth. Seed treatment and foliar application of peppermint EO and/or cuminaldehyde significantly reduced the development of bean anthracnose. We introduced B. persicum EO and constituents, cuminaldehyde and γ-terpinene, as possible control agents for bean anthracnose.

Electric arc is a complex phenomenon occurring during the current interruption process in the power system. Therefore performing digital simulations is often necessary to analyse transient conditions in power system during switching operations. This paper deals with the electric arc modelling and its implementation in simulation software for transient analyses during switching conditions in power system. Cassie, Cassie-Mayr as well as Schwarz-Avdonin equations describing the behaviour of the electric arc during the current interruption process have been implemented in EMTP-ATP simulation software and presented in this paper. The models developed have been used for transient simulations to analyse impact of the particular model and its parameters on Transient Recovery Voltage in different switching scenarios: during shunt reactor switching-off as well as during capacitor bank current switching-off. The selected simulation cases represent typical practical scenarios for inductive and capacitive currents breaking, respectively.

Feasibility of a model of gas bubble break-up and coalescence in an air-lift column enabling determination of bubble size distributions in a mixer with a self-aspirating impeller has been attempted in this paper. According to velocity measurements made by the PIV method with a self-aspirating impeller and Smagorinski’s model, the spatial distribution of turbulent energy dissipation rate close to the impeller was determined. This allowed to positively verify the dependence of gas bubble velocity used in the model, in relation to turbulent energy dissipation rate. Furthermore, the range of the eddy sizes capable of breaking up the gas bubbles was determined. The verified model was found to be greatly useful, but because of the simplifying assumptions some discrepancies of experimental and model results were observed.

Orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) in Long Term Evolution (LTE) can effectively eliminate intra-cell interferences between the subcarriers in a single serving cell. But, there is more critical issue that, OFDMA cannot accomplish to decrease the inter-cell interference. In our proposed method, we aimed to increase signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) by dividing the cells as cell center and cell edge. While decreasing the interference between cells, we also aimed to increase overall system throughput. For this reason, we proposed a dynamic resource allocation technique that is called Experience-Based Dynamic Soft Frequency Reuse (EBDSFR). We compared our proposed scheme with different resource allocation schemes that are Dynamic Inter-cellular Bandwidth Fair Sharing FFR (FFRDIBFS) and Dynamic Inter-cellular Bandwidth Fair Sharing Reuse-3 (Reuse3DIBFS). Simulation results indicate that, proposed EBDSFR benefits from overall cell throughput and obtains higher user fairness than the reference schemes.

Advanced metallic material processes (titanium) are used or developed for the production of heavily loaded flying components (in fan blade construction). The article presents one process for diagnosing the blade interior by means of laser ultrasonography. The inspection of these parts, which are mainly made of titanium, requires the determination of the percentage of bonded grain sizes from around 10 to 30 μm. This is primarily due to the advantages of a high signal-to-noise ratio and good detection sensitivity. The results of the research into the internal blade structure are attached.

A correlation measuring tool for an endogenous pulsed neutron source experiment is developed in this work. Paroxysmal pulses generated by a bursts of neutron chains are detected by a 10-kbit embedded shift register with a time resolution of 100 ns. The system is implemented on a single reprogrammable device making it a compact, cost-effective instrument, easily adaptable for any case study. The system was verified experimentally in the Esfahan heavy-water zero power reactor (EHWZPR). The results obtained by the measuring tool are validated by the Feynman-α experiment, and a good agreement is seen within the boundaries of statistical uncertainties. The theory of the methods is briefly initiated in the text. Also, the system structure is described, the experimental results and their uncertainties are discussed, and neutron statistics in EHWZPR is examined experimentally.

The micro-Particle Image Velocimetry (micro-PIV) was used to measure flow velocities in micro-channels

in two passive micromixers: a microfluidic Venturi mixer and a microfluidic spiral mixer, both preceded

by standard “Y” micromixers. The micro-devices were made of borosilicate glass, with micro-engineering

techniques dedicated to micro-PIV measurements. The obtained velocity profiles show differences in the

flow structure in both cases. The micro-PIV enables understanding the micro-flow phenomena and can help

to increase reproducibility of micromixers in mass production.

Perinatal calf mortality in dairy herds has been reported worldwide. The etiology of stillbirth is multifactorial, and can be caused by various species of bacteria and environmental factors. Among them some potential pathogens from the Mollicutes class such as Mycoplasma (M.) spp. and Ureaplasma (U.) diversum can be isolated from the bovine genital tract and other organs of the suspected cattle. The aim of this study was to evaluate if the bacteria belonging to the Molli- cutes class i.e. M. bovis, M. bovigenitalium, M. canadense, M. canis, M. arginini, M. bovirhinis, M. dispar, M. alkalescens and U. diversum could have an impact on perinatal calf mortality in selected Polish dairy farms. The material was: 121 stillborn calves (SB), 21 live born calves (C) and 131 cows (dams) from 30 Polish Holstein-Friesian herds. Samples were examined from all the SB calves’ and six control euthanized calves’ abomasal contents and lung samples collected during necropsy, and from the dams’ serum and placenta. In dams the serological ELISA, and in calves and placenta samples molecular PCR/denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis, methods were used. Screening of dams’ sera for antibodies to M. bovis (ELISA) showed seven dams positive for M. bovis, whereas none of the nine examined Mollicutes microorganisms were detected in the placenta and calves.