Potassium iodide (KI) impregnated activated carbons were prepared and applied for the removal of hydrogen sulfide. The adsorption dynamics of the prepared adsorbents were investigated in fixed-bed column as functions of the concentration of hydrogen sulfide and oxygen, and relative humidity. It was found that the adsorption capacity was highly dependent on the oxygen concentration because of the chemical adsorption of hydrogen sulfide on KI impregnated activated carbon. The adsorbents before and after adsorption of hydrogen sulfide were characterized by BET, SEM and EDS analysis.

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Introducing the planes of symmetry into an oscillating rigid body suspended by springs simplifies the complexity of the equations of motion and decouples the modes of vibration into in-plane and out-of-plane modes. There have been some research results from the investigation into the conditions for planes of symmetry in which prior conditions for the simplification of the equations of motion are required. In this article, the conditions for the planes of symmetry that do not need prior conditions for simplification are presented. The conditions are derived from direct expansions of eigenvalue problems for stiffness and mass matrices that are expressed in terms of in-plane and out-of-plane modes and the orthogonality condition with respect to the mass matrix. Two special points, the planar couple point and the perpendicular translation point are identified, where the expressions for stiffness and compliance matrices can be greatly simplified. The simplified expressions are utilized to obtain the analytical expressions for the axes of vibration of a vibration system with planes of symmetry.

Robust pitch estimation is important in many areas of speech processing. In voice pathology, diverse statistics extracted form pitch estimation were commonly used to test voice quality. In this study, we compared several established pitch detection algorithms (PDAs) for verification of adequacy of the PDAs. In the database of total pathological voices of 99 and normal voices of 30, an analysis of errors related with pitch detection was evaluated between pathological and normal voices, or among the types of pathological voices. Pitch errors of all PDAs used in this study more or less showed some changes between pathological and normal voices. According to the results of pitch errors, gross pitch error showed some increases in cases of pathological voices; especially excessive increase in PDA based on nonlinear time-series. In an analysis of types of pathological voices classified by aperiodicity and the degree of chaos, the more voice has aperiodic and chaotic, the more growth of pitch errors increased. Consequently, it is required to survey the severity of tested voice in order to obtain accurate pitch estimates.

Core body temperature is a reliable marker for circadian rhythm. As characteristics of the circadian body temperature rhythm change during diverse health problems, such as sleep disorder and depression, body temperature monitoring is often used in clinical diagnosis and treatment. However, the use of current thermometers in circadian rhythm monitoring is impractical in daily life. As heart rate is a physiological signal relevant to thermoregulation, we investigated the feasibility of heart rate monitoring in estimating circadian body temperature rhythm. Various heart rate parameters and core body temperature were simultaneously acquired in 21 healthy, ambulatory subjects during their routine life. The performance of regression analysis and the extended Kalman filter on daily body temperature and circadian indicator (mesor, amplitude, and acrophase) estimation were evaluated. For daily body temperature estimation, mean R-R interval (RRI), mean heart rate (MHR), or normalized MHR provided a mean root mean square error of approximately 0.40 °C in both techniques. The mesor estimation regression analysis showed better performance than the extended Kalman filter. However, the extended Kalman filter, combined with RRI or MHR, provided better accuracy in terms of amplitude and acrophase estimation. We suggest that this noninvasive and convenient method for estimating the circadian body temperature rhythm could reduce discomfort during body temperature monitoring in daily life. This, in turn, could facilitate more clinical studies based on circadian body temperature rhythm.