The influence of oil viscosity and refrigerant quality on evaporator performance

The presence of oil in an evaporator degrades performance by reducing evaporator heat pick-up and by increasing the evaporator pressure drops. It can be demonstrated that there is an optimum refrigerant mass flow rate for a given refrigerant-oil combination and oil concentration. Also, oil viscosity has an effect on the evaporator performance at low oil concentrations. Finally, it is suggested that low viscosity oil be used at low oil concentrations and high viscosity oil at high oil concentrations.     

"Rereading text: Words and their context": Erratum.

Reports an error in the original article by B. A. Levy et al (Canadian Journal of Psychology, 1991[Dec], Vol 45[4], 492–506). Corrections to tables 2 and 3 regarding mean reading times during original reading and rereading in Exps 1 and 2, respectively, are provided. (The following abstract of this article originally appeared in PA Vol 79:18597.) Two experiments examined whether the benefits of rereading are mediated by abstract word-level representations and are subject to the reader's focus of attention (T. H. Carr and J. S. Brown; see record 1990-27485-001). The effect of prior reading history was measured when 50 undergraduates reread a normal text and a scrambled word version of the text. The prior reading history was either with the normal or the scrambled version. In Exp 1, readers were oriented to surface level processing by a Greek letter detection task while reading. In Exp 2, Ss were oriented to message level processing by being required to write a summary of the text after each rereading. Transfer to normal text rereading is context specific, and this specificity is resistant to influences by focus of attention. Transfer to rereading scrambled word displays is variable, usually nonspecific, and perhaps open to attentional strategy. (French abstract) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Dopaminergic modulation of visual sensitivity in man

A large body of experimental evidence supports the hypothesis that dopamine is a functional neuromodulator at many levels of the visual system. Intrinsic dopaminergic neurons were characterized in most mammalian retina, including man. These neurons give rise to a dendritic plexus covering the retina. Thus, dopamine seems to be involved in the organization of the ganglion cell and the bipolar cell receptive fields and modulates physiological activity of photoreceptors, both processes which underlie sensitivity and spatial selectivity of visual processing in the early stage of the visual system. Moreover, few data are now available concerning the functional significance of dopaminergic modulation of visual sensitivity in man. Parkinson's disease is a specific disorder of central dopaminergic systems. Abnormalities in the pattern-evoked potentials and electroretinogram have been found in parkinsonian patients. Contrast sensitivity, a useful tool for measuring visual spatio-temporal sensitivity in man, has also been shown to be modified due to this affection. Dynamic contrast sensitivity is primarily decreased in these patients, distinguishing them from the normal aging process. Because these modifications in shape of the contrast sensitivity function are reversed by L-Dopa, and that neuroleptic administration could reproduce them in schizophrenia patients, it was suggested that dopamine might tune the contrast sensitivity function in man. We have recently shown that subcutaneous apomorphine induces changes in contrast sensitivity in healthy volunteers, which preferentially affect motion sensitivity. These dopaminergic sensitive modifications in the shape of the contrast sensitivity function might reflect a change in the range of sensitivity of the visual system, both in dynamic and spatial properties. This could be explained by a modification in the spatial and dynamic properties of the ganglion cell responses in the retina. Moreover, we suggest both from our results and from the review of the literature that human psychophysical data confirm the hypothesis that dopamine may be involved in light retinal adaptation, as light-induced and dopamine-induced modifications in the shape in the contrast sensitivity function are quite similar.     

Molecular structure,morphology, and antioxidant- consumption in polybutene-1 pipes in hot-water applications

Pipes of isotactic polybutene-1 (PB) have been exposed to internal water and external air in pressure tests at 105°C. The pipes exposed to different internal pressures exhibited different failure mechanisms, referred to as stages I, II, and III. Samples taken from these pipes have been analyzed by infrared (IR) spectroscopy, wide-angle X-ray scattering (WAXS), size exclusion chromatography (SEC), and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). IR spectroscopy and WAXS confirmed that thermal oxidation of the amorphous part of the polymer accompanied the onset of stage III. Thermal oxidation led to extensive molar mass reduction and to a significant increase in mass crystallinity and melting peak temperature. Extensive and visible degradation in pipes failing according to stage III was confined to so-called “oxidation spots.” The latter were first formed at the outer wall and propagated inwards, finally constituting approximately 50% of the wall thickness. The antioxidant concentration profiles obtained by DSC were always symmetrical and were successfully adapted to a previously developed model. It was shown that migration of the antioxidant was the dominant loss mechanism, that the diffusion coefficient was constant through the pipe wall, and that the evaporative loss to the external air was marginally greater than the loss to the internal water phase. Chemical consumption of the antioxidant was found to be negligible.     

Grain Growth in CaO-Stabilized ZrO2 in the Presence of a Liquid Phase

Calcia-stabilized zirconia, CSZ (7.5 wt% CaO), with impurities of A1₂O₃, SiO₂, MgO, Fe₂O₃, and TiO₂, was sintered in air at 1783 K for times (t) up to 230 h. The microstructure consisted of grains of CSZ with small amounts of pores and a CaO-Al₂O₃-SiO₂ eutectic. Grain diameters grew in proportion to t^1/3. The results are consistent with a mechanism in which grain growth is limited by diffusion of Zr⁴⁺ ions through the liquid eutectic.     

Semiochemical basis of infestation of honey bee brood byVarroa jacobsoni

Capping of workerApis mellifera cells is elicited by four fatty acid methyl esters (Methyl palmitate, methyl oleate, methyl linoleate, and methyl linolenate) that are present on the surface of the worker and drone larvae only a few hours before the cell is closed. The amount of the pheromone reaches its maximum value when the cell has just been capped, at 8.5 and at 10.25 days of age, respectively, for worker and drone larvae. Thereafter, the amount of the pheromone decreases to its initial level. These data suggest that the esters also have a role in the capping of the drone cells, the temporal signal allowing the worker bees to recognize the age of the larvae and then to do the appropriate behavior. Two pheromonal components, methyl palmitate and methyl linolenate, and the inactive ethyl palmitate are kairomones attractive toVarroa females. Their secretion by the larvae follows the same pattern of development as the pheromonal signal. The longer and greater kairomonal signal in drone larvae, compared to worker secretion, could explain the preference ofVarroa towards drone brood.     

An iterated local search heuristic for multi-capacity bin packing and machine reassignment problems

This paper proposes an efficient Multi-Start Iterated Local Search for Packing Problems (MS-ILS-PPs) metaheuristic for Multi-Capacity Bin Packing Problems (MCBPP) and Machine Reassignment Problems (MRP). The MCBPP is a generalization of the classical bin-packing problem in which the machine (bin) capacity and task (item) sizes are given by multiple (resource) dimensions. The MRP is a challenging and novel optimization problem, aimed at maximizing the usage of available machines by reallocating tasks/processes among those machines in a cost-efficient manner, while fulfilling several capacity, conflict, and dependency-related constraints. The proposed MS-ILS-PP approach relies on simple neighborhoods as well as problem-tailored shaking procedures. We perform computational experiments on MRP benchmark instances containing between 100 and 50,000 processes. Near-optimum multi-resource allocation and scheduling solutions are obtained while meeting specified processing-time requirements (on the order of minutes). In particular, for 9/28 instances with more than 1000 processes, the gap between the solution value and a lower bound measure is smaller than 0.1%. Our optimization method is also applied to solve classical benchmark instances for the MCBPP, yielding the best known solutions and optimum ones in most cases. In addition, several upper bounds for non-solved problems were improved.