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Zhuang, Yu

Publications and source records attributed to Zhuang, Yu.

Enzymatic synthesis of 1-caffeoylglycerol with deep eutectic solvent under continuous microflow conditions

1-caffeoylglycerol (1-CG) is a hydrophilic ester with a high solubility, and has a strong activity to prevent skin cancer caused by ultraviolet. However, the current preparation process to synthesize 1-CG via transesterification from methyl caffeate (MC) and glycerin was not economic due to long reaction time or adding extra field. Therefore, an enzymatic synthesis with deep eutectic solvent chloride-urea (ChCl-urea) in a microreactor was firstly applied under continuous microflow condition to improve the productivity. A maximum 1-CG yield of 96.49% was obtained under the optimized conditions: temperature of 65 degrees C, flow rate of 2 $μ$L/min, MC concentration of 50 g/L. Compared to the batch reactor, the reaction time reduced by 75%, the $K_m$ value decreased by 5/6, the reuse times of lipase increased by 2.29-fold, the external mass and transfer coefficients increased 10 times, which process was verified by numerical simulation. In addition, the produced 1-CG of 2 mg/mL has a high UV damage remediation ability of 75.16% using HaCaT cell model, which reveals 1-CG can repair the damage of cells radiated by the UV. Thus, this approach represents a convenient and cost-saving method to produce 1-CG using microfuidic biocatalysis.

09 BIOMASS FUELS↗

Collective input/output under memory constraints

Compared with current high-performance computing (HPC) systems, exascale systems are expected to have much less memory per node, which can significantly reduce necessary collective input/output (I/O) performance. In this study, we introduce a memory-conscious collective I/O strategy that takes into account memory capacity and bandwidth constraints. The new strategy restricts aggregation data traffic within disjointed subgroups, coordinates I/O accesses in intranode and internode layers, and determines I/O aggregators at run time considering memory consumption among processes. We have prototyped the design and evaluated it with commonly used benchmarks to verify its potential. The evaluation results demonstrate that this strategy holds promise in mitigating the memory pressure, alleviating the contention for memory bandwidth, and improving the I/O performance for projected extreme-scale systems. Given the importance of supporting increasingly data-intensive workloads and projected memory constraints on increasingly larger scale HPC systems, this new memory-conscious collective I/O can have a significant positive impact on scientific discovery productivity.

collective input/output↗

Performance model-directed data sieving for high-performance I/O

Many scientific computing applications and engineering simulations exhibit noncontiguous I/O access patterns. Data sieving is an important technique to improve the performance of noncontiguous I/O accesses by combining small and noncontiguous requests into a large and contiguous request. It has been proven effective even though more data are potentially accessed than demanded. In this study, we propose a new data sieving approach namely performance model-directed data sieving, or PMD data sieving in short. It improves the existing data sieving approach from two aspects: (1) dynamically determines when it is beneficial to perform data sieving; and (2) dynamically determines how to perform data sieving if beneficial. It improves the performance of the existing data sieving approach considerably and reduces the memory consumption as verified by both theoretical analysis and experimental results. Given the importance of supporting noncontiguous accesses effectively and reducing the memory pressure in a large-scale system, the proposed PMD data sieving approach in this research holds a great promise and will have an impact on high-performance I/O systems.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

A High-Order Direct Solver for Helmholtz Equations with Neumann Boundary Conditions

In this study, a compact finite-difference discretization is first developed for Helmholtz equations on rectangular domains. Special treatments are then introduced for Neumann and Neumann-Dirichlet boundary conditions to achieve accuracy and separability. Finally, a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) based technique is used to yield a fast direct solver. Analytical and experimental results show this newly proposed solver is comparable to the conventional second-order elliptic solver when accuracy is not a primary concern, and is significantly faster than that of the conventional solver if a highly accurate solution is required. In addition, this newly proposed fourth order Helmholtz solver is parallel in nature. It is readily available for parallel and distributed computers. The compact scheme introduced in this study is likely extendible for sixth-order accurate algorithms and for more general elliptic equations.

Sun, Xian-He↗