Waste Marble Dust Blended Cement

Marble processing activities generates a.significant amount of waste in dust form. This waste, which is nowadays one of the environmental problems worldwide, presents great potential of being used as mineral addition in blended cements production. This paper shows preliminary results of an ongoing project which ultimate goal is to investigate the viability of using waste marble dust (WMD), produced by marble Portuguese industry, as cement replacement material. In order to evaluate the effects of the WMD on mechanical behaviour, different mortar blended cement mixtures were tested. These mixtures were prepared with different partial substitution level of cement with WMD. Strength results of WMD blended cements were compared to control cements with same level of incorporation of natural limestone used to produce commercial Portland-limestone cements. The results obtained show that WMD blended cements perform better than limestone blended cements for same replacement level up to 20% w/w. Therefore, WMD reveals promising attributes for blended cements production.

Remoção de metais usando casca de amendoim

Mestrado em Engenharia Química

Projecto de implementação RFID na empresa ATEC

Mestrado em Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores

Citotoxicidade do ácido peracético: avaliação metabólica, estrutural e de morte em fibroblastos L929

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)

Topological Complexity and Predictability in the Dynamics of a Tumor Growth Model with Shilnikov's Chaos

Dynamical systems modeling tumor growth have been investigated to determine the dynamics between tumor and healthy cells. Recent theoretical investigations indicate that these interactions may lead to different dynamical outcomes, in particular to homoclinic chaos. In the present study, we analyze both topological and dynamical properties of a recently characterized chaotic attractor governing the dynamics of tumor cells interacting with healthy tissue cells and effector cells of the immune system. By using the theory of symbolic dynamics, we first characterize the topological entropy and the parameter space ordering of kneading sequences from one-dimensional iterated maps identified in the dynamics, focusing on the effects of inactivation interactions between both effector and tumor cells. The previous analyses are complemented with the computation of the spectrum of Lyapunov exponents, the fractal dimension and the predictability of the chaotic attractors. Our results show that the inactivation rate of effector cells by the tumor cells has an important effect on the dynamics of the system. The increase of effector cells inactivation involves an inverse Feigenbaum (i.e. period-halving bifurcation) scenario, which results in the stabilization of the dynamics and in an increase of dynamics predictability. Our analyses also reveal that, at low inactivation rates of effector cells, tumor cells undergo strong, chaotic fluctuations, with the dynamics being highly unpredictable. Our findings are discussed in the context of tumor cells potential viability.

Desenvolvimento de pastilha potencialmente probiótica

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

Efeito da combinação de antibióticos e sinvastatina sobre microrganismos de interesse endodôntico e na expressão de marcadores odontoblásticos

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)

Auditoria e optimização energética à secção de impregnação de uma indústria têxtil

Mestrado em Engenharia Química

Influência da espessura do substrato dental sobre a eficácia clareadora e citotoxicidade de diferentes protocolos de clareamento

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)

The usefulness of ultrasound in the classification of chronic liver disease

Chronic Liver Disease is a progressive, most of the time asymptomatic, and potentially fatal disease. In this paper, a semi-automatic procedure to stage this disease is proposed based on ultrasound liver images, clinical and laboratorial data. In the core of the algorithm two classifiers are used: a k nearest neighbor and a Support Vector Machine, with different kernels. The classifiers were trained with the proposed multi-modal feature set and the results obtained were compared with the laboratorial and clinical feature set. The results showed that using ultrasound based features, in association with laboratorial and clinical features, improve the classification accuracy. The support vector machine, polynomial kernel, outperformed the others classifiers in every class studied. For the Normal class we achieved 100% accuracy, for the chronic hepatitis with cirrhosis 73.08%, for compensated cirrhosis 59.26% and for decompensated cirrhosis 91.67%.

Chronic liver disease staging classification based on ultrasound, clinical and laboratorial data

In this work the identification and diagnosis of various stages of chronic liver disease is addressed. The classification results of a support vector machine, a decision tree and a k-nearest neighbor classifier are compared. Ultrasound image intensity and textural features are jointly used with clinical and laboratorial data in the staging process. The classifiers training is performed by using a population of 97 patients at six different stages of chronic liver disease and a leave-one-out cross-validation strategy. The best results are obtained using the support vector machine with a radial-basis kernel, with 73.20% of overall accuracy. The good performance of the method is a promising indicator that it can be used, in a non invasive way, to provide reliable information about the chronic liver disease staging.

Avaliação técnica e econômica de um biodigestor de fluxo tubular: estudo de caso do modelo implantado na etec "orlando quagliato" em Santa Cruz do Rio Pardo, SP

Pós-graduação em Agronomia (Energia na Agricultura) - FCA

Tubulin cofactor A gene silencing in mammalian cells induces changes in microtubule cytoskeleton, cell cycle arrest and cell death

Microtubules are polymers of alpha/beta-tubulin participating in essential cell functions. A multistep process involving distinct molecular chaperones and cofactors produces new tubulin heterodimers competent to polymerise. In vitro cofactor A (TBCA) interacts with beta-tubulin in a quasi-native state behaving as a molecular chaperone. We have used siRNA to silence TBCA expression in HeLa and MCF-7 mammalian cell lines. TBCA is essential for cell viability and its knockdown produces a decrease in the amount of soluble tubulin, modifications in microtubules and G1 cell cycle arrest. In MCF-7 cells, cell death was preceded by a change in cell shape resembling differentiation.

Gene expression regulation and lineage evolution: the North and South tale of the hybrid polyploid Squalius alburnoides complex

The evolution of hybrid polyploid vertebrates, their viability and their perpetuation over evolutionary time have always been questions of great interest. However, little is known about the impact of hybridization and polyploidization on the regulatory networks that guarantee the appropriate quantitative and qualitative gene expression programme. The Squalius alburnoides complex of hybrid fish is an attractive system to address these questions, as it includes a wide variety of diploid and polyploid forms, and intricate systems of genetic exchange. Through the study of genome-specific allele expression of seven housekeeping and tissue-specific genes, we found that a gene copy silencing mechanism of dosage compensation exists throughout the distribution range of the complex. Here we show that the allele-specific patterns of silencing vary within the complex, according to the geographical origin and the type of genome involved in the hybridization process. In southern populations, triploids of S. alburnoides show an overall tendency for silencing the allele from the minority genome, while northern population polyploids exhibit preferential biallelic gene expression patterns, irrespective of genomic composition. The present findings further suggest that gene copy silencing and variable expression of specific allele combinations may be important processes in vertebrate polyploid evolution.

Análise de risco em sequenciamento de actividades com restrições de recursos

Mestrado em Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores. Área de Especialização em Sistemas e Planeamento Industrial.