Translation of ATL to AGT and application to a code generator for Simulink

Software and Systems Modeling - Analysing and reasoning on model transformations has become very relevant for various applications such as ensuring the correctness of transformations. ATL is a...     

The Lithium/Air Battery: Still an Emerging System or a Practical Reality?

Lithium/air is a fascinating energy storage system. The effective exploitation of air as a battery electrode has been the long‐time dream of the battery community. Air is, in principle, a no‐cost material characterized by a very high specific capacity value. In the particular case of the lithium/air system, energy levels approaching that of gasoline have been postulated. It is then not surprising that, in the course of the last decade, great attention has been devoted to this battery by various top academic and industrial laboratories worldwide. This intense investigation, however, has soon highlighted a series of issues that prevent a rapid development of the Li/air electrochemical system. Although several breakthroughs have been achieved recently, the question on whether this battery will have an effective economic and societal impact remains. In this review, a critical evaluation of the progress achieved so far is made, together with an attempt to propose future R&D trends. A forecast on whether Li/air may have a role in the next years' battery technology is also postulated.     

Effects of water–cement solutions on the composition of organic compounds leached from oxidized Callovo–Oxfordian argillaceous sediment

Both oxygen penetration, due to excavation, and the use of hydraulic cement as engineering barrier has led to the investigation of effects of high pH solutions on the oxidized host rock formation. A Callovo–Oxfordian sediment has been oxidized in a ventilated drying oven at 130 °C between 2 and 1024 h. The geochemical characterization of oxidized samples shows that oxidation induces transformations in extractable organic matter similar to those observed during thermal maturation. Rock-Eval analyses of extracted solid residues reveal a loss of hydrogen while oxygen is incorporated into the kerogen structure during oxidation experiments. The oxidized samples have been leached with deionized water and cement solution. Comparisons between basic and near-neutral leaching treatments showed that the amounts and nature of leached organic species are pH-dependent. The dissolved organic compound amounts are higher at basic pH than at pH close to neutrality. Gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC-MS) analyses show that aromatic carboxylic acids are preferentially leached by deionized water, while n-carboxylic acids predominate in cementitious solution. The data reveal that kerogen oxygen content may constrain the dissolved concentration of organic species. The DOC concentration and the C=O functionality of leachable organic molecules increase with increasing duration of oxidation.     

Charles Jencks and the historiography of Post-Modernism

The history of Post-Modern Architecture was to a large extent tied to the name of Charles Jencks, who played an operative role in promoting the movement, much like his predecessor Sigfried Giedion had done for Modern Architecture in the 1930s. Like Giedion, Jencks was a prolific writer and a protagonist of a radical change in the direction of architecture. In the thirty-five year period from the appearance of his first book in 1971, Jencks published more than twenty four works, not counting the ones he edited or co-edited. And like Giedion, Jencks also attempted to reach a synthesis of opposites, by including disparate examples within his original ‘canon’, extending it in its last revision to include works by Eisenman and Tschumi, as Giedion had done by the inclusion of Aalto and Utzon in his later editions of Space, Time and Architecture. This paper will discuss Jencks's historiography of Post-Modernism by looking at the seminal texts that he wrote from 1970 until 2007, beginning with Architecture 2000 and ending with Critical Modernism. The main focus of this article is critically to examine his major work, the Language of Post Modernism, and to trace its evolution as a means of evaluating his contribution to the development of this movement, as well as to architectural historiography.     

Rapid identification of Candida species with species-specific DNA probes

Rapid identification of Candida species has become more important because of an increase in infections caused by species other than Candida albicans, including species innately resistant to azole antifungal drugs. We previously developed a PCR assay with an enzyme immunoassay (EIA) format to detect amplicons from the five most common Candida species by using universal fungal primers and species-specific probes directed to the ITS2 region of the gene for rRNA. We designed probes to detect seven additional Candida species (C. guilliermondii, C. kefyr, C. lambica, C. lusitaniae, C. pelliculosa, C. rugosa, and C. zeylanoides) included in the API 20C sugar assimilation panel, five probes for species not identified by API 20C (C. haemulonii, C. norvegica, C. norvegensis, C. utilis, and C. viswanathii), and a probe for the newly described species C. dubliniensis, creating a panel of 18 Candida species probes. The PCR-EIA correctly identified multiple strains of each species tested, including five identified as C. albicans by the currently available API 20C database but determined to be C. dubliniensis by genotypic and nonroutine phenotypic characteristics. Species identification time was reduced from a mean of 3.5 days by conventional identification methods to 7 h by the PCR-EIA. This method is simple, rapid, and feasible for identifying Candida species in clinical laboratories that utilize molecular identification techniques and provides a novel method to differentiate the new species, C. dubliniensis, from C. albicans.     

Melting of hydrogels containing ammonium nitrate

The fusion of hydrogels containing ammonium nitrate (AN) has been investigated by differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). The polymers used were guar and xanthan gums as well as synthetic polyacrylamide polymers. Water in hydrogels could be classified into three types labeled as ordinary water (hump of the melting peak), intermediate water (broad component of the peak), and bound nonfreezing water (without any phase transition). The temperature of fusion of intermediate water was about 10° to 35°C lower than that of ordinary water. Intermediate and bound water was found in all the gels studied, whereas ordinary water existed mainly in mixtures with total water content higher than 62%. The presence, type, and concentration of a crosslinker had no effect on the amount of bound water in hydrogels containing AN. In such mixtures the amount of nonfreezing water increased with the polymer concentration as well with the AN proportion relative to water and represented in some cases up to 27% of the gel. Cold-crystallization was observed in all cases (except xanthan) and was probably initiated by AN or the crosslinking agent.     

RDFI determination of anisotropic and scattering dependent radiative conductivity tensors in porous media: Application to rod bundles

A radiative conductivity model is developed for porous media with a solid opaque phase and a transparent fluid phase. In a first step, an effective semi transparent medium occupying the volume of the real fluid phase is characterized, assuming the validity of the Beer’s laws. For example, rod bundles in squared or triangular configurations can be directly characterized by effective strongly anisotropic extinction, absorption and scattering coefficients, optical index and phase function, which depends on both the incident and scattering unit vectors, by generalizing the Radiative Distribution Function Identification method of Tancrez and Taine [M. Tancrez, J. Taine, Direct identification of absorption and scattering coefficients and phase function of a porous medium by a Monte Carlo technique, Int. J. Heat Mass Transfer 47 (2004) 373–383]. The validity and accuracy of the associated Beer’s laws are discussed in this case. In a second step, at the limit of an optically thick porous medium, an original model based on a perturbation method of the Radiative Transfer Equation directly leads to the determination, under an accurate validity criterion, of a radiative conductivity tensor for the fluid phase. Examples of results are given in the case of rod bundles versus porosity, specific area and local wall absorptivity.