Modification of phenol–formaldehyde resol resins by lignin,starch, and urea

Lignin‐based chemicals, starch, and urea were used as modifiers for phenol–formaldehyde resol resins. The effects of the addition stage of the modifiers used in the synthesis of the resins and the type of modification reagent on the structures of the resins and their molar masses and reactivities were investigated. The modifications with corn starch and lignin promoted condensation; this was verified by increased molar masses and high ratios of methylene bridges to the sum of free ortho and para aromatic groups with respect to the corresponding reference resin without a modification reagent. The later the modifier was added to the resin condensation mixture, the more methylene bridges were formed with respect to the amounts of free ortho and para aromatic groups. In addition, when urea or wheat starch was added in the later condensation stage, the final condensation also reached high stages. The modifications with lignosulfonate and starch, as well as the early addition of urea, enhanced p–p′ bridge structures. The lowest condensation stage and, therefore, the highest reactivity were found when wheat starch was added with the starting reagents. The curing heat of the wheat‐starch‐modified resins decreased according to the deferred addition point of starch. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 88: 582–588, 2003     

Additive manufacturing in the spare parts supply chain

As additive manufacturing (AM) evolves to become a common method of producing final parts, further study of this computer integrated technology is necessary. The purpose of this research is to evaluate the potential impact of additive manufacturing improvements on the configuration of spare parts supply chains. This goal has been accomplished through scenario modeling of a real-life spare parts supply chain in the aeronautics industry. The spare parts supply chain of the F-18 Super Hornet fighter jet was selected as the case study because the air-cooling ducts of the environmental control system are produced using AM technology. In total, four scenarios are investigated that vary the supply chain configurations and additive manufacturing machine specifications. The reference scenario is based on the spare parts supplier's current practice and the possible future decentralization of production and likely improvements in AM technology. Total operating cost, including downtime cost, is used to compare the scenarios. We found that using current AM technology, centralized production is clearly the preferable supply chain configuration in the case example. However, distributed spare parts production becomes practical as AM machines become less capital intensive, more autonomous and offer shorter production cycles. This investigation provides guidance for the development of additive manufacturing machines and their possible deployment in spare parts supply chains. This study contributes to the emerging literature on AM deployment in supply chains with a real-world case setting and scenario model illustrating the cost trade-offs and critical requirements for technology development.     

Safety Considerations during Different Stages of a Project Life Cycle in the Manufacturing Industry

At sites with multiple employers, efficient safety management is essential to ensure safety for both customers and providers. However, implementing effective safety management is challenging, particularly for companies that provide services. Provider companies encounter difficulties managing the safety of service projects for many reasons, including the variety of customers and changes in work environment. Proper preparation and integration of safety into the different project life cycle stages improves safety, but the topic has not received much attention to date. This article discusses the integration of safety considerations into service projects. Material was collected from Finnish manufacturing companies via interviews and a questionnaire. The results show that systematic methods for developing and producing services have not been adopted in the provider companies, but these are often implemented as a result of practical experience. On the other hand, providers and customers both believed that safety is taken into account during different stages of a given service project—safety issues were to some extent taken into account during the tendering and contract stages of a project, and preventive safety measures were commonly implemented during the delivery of services. However, safety performance often was not evaluated after completion of work. For this reason, companies may not have an accurate estimation of each other's safety performance in these types of multi‐employer situations. The results of this study can be used in provider organizations to help systematize safety considerations during service projects and to focus efforts on the most essential points of service project safety management.     

Processing intrusion detection alert aggregates with time series modeling

The main use of intrusion detection systems (IDS) is to detect attacks against information systems and networks. Normal use of the network and its functioning can also be monitored with an IDS. It can be used to control, for example, the use of management and signaling protocols, or the network traffic related to some less critical aspects of system policies. These complementary usages can generate large numbers of alerts, but still, in operational environment, the collection of such data may be mandated by the security policy. Processing this type of alerts presents a different problem than correlating alerts directly related to attacks or filtering incorrectly issued alerts.We aggregate individual alerts to alert flows, and then process the flows instead of individual alerts for two reasons. First, this is necessary to cope with the large quantity of alerts – a common problem among all alert correlation approaches. Second, individual alert’s relevancy is often indeterminable, but irrelevant alerts and interesting phenomena can be identified at the flow level. This is the particularity of the alerts created by the complementary uses of IDSes.Flows consisting of alerts related to normal system behavior can contain strong regularities. We propose to model these regularities using non-stationary autoregressive models. Once modeled, the regularities can be filtered out to relieve the security operator from manual analysis of true, but low impact alerts. We present experimental results using these models to process voluminous alert flows from an operational network.     

Engineered Multifunctional Albumin‐Decorated Porous Silicon Nanoparticles for FcRn Translocation of Insulin

The last decade has seen remarkable advances in the development of drug delivery systems as alternative to parenteral injection‐based delivery of insulin. Neonatal Fc receptor (FcRn)‐mediated transcytosis has been recently proposed as a strategy to increase the transport of drugs across the intestinal epithelium. FcRn‐targeted nanoparticles (NPs) could hijack the FcRn transcytotic pathway and cross the epithelial cell layer. In this study, a novel nanoparticulate system for insulin delivery based on porous silicon NPs is proposed. After surface conjugation with albumin and loading with insulin, the NPs are encapsulated into a pH‐responsive polymeric particle by nanoprecipitation. The developed NP formulation shows controlled size and homogeneous size distribution. Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) images show successful encapsulation of the NPs into pH‐sensitive polymeric particles. No insulin release is detected at acidic conditions, but a controlled release profile is observed at intestinal pH. Toxicity studies show high compatibility of the NPs with intestinal cells. In vitro insulin permeation across the intestinal epithelium shows approximately fivefold increase when insulin is loaded into FcRn‐targeted NPs. Overall, these FcRn‐targeted NPs offer a toolbox in the development of targeted therapies for oral delivery of insulin.     

Results of Finnish national survey on EU legislation concerning computer work

The European Directive on computer work (VDU 90/270/EEC) is implemented in the Finnish Government Decree. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the effects of the legislation and its applications in practice. The quantitative method used an online questionnaire. The respondents were employers (N = 934), employees (N = 1872) and occupational health care (OHC) units (N = 289). The majority of all these three groups considered the provisions clear and easy to understand, comprehensive, and easy to comply with. The provisions had a great impact on preventing mental overloading, arranging sight tests at the employer's cost, and on the refunding of eyeglasses for computer work. Most employers felt they did not need any more specific provisions, whereas half of the employees and OHC professionals would have liked the provisions to be more detailed. More explicit and specific regulations were also needed for practice applications in particular, as well as for the refunding of the costs of special eyeglasses for computer work. A total of 59% of the employers reported that costs of glasses are refunded, whereas the figure for employees was clearly lower (37%). OHC professionals reported that the costs of glasses were refunded in 82% of their customer workplaces. The practical conclusion is that employees' sight examinations and compensation for eyeglasses should be promoted in computer work. Moreover, ergonomic applications are best carried out in co-operation with OHC personnel.     

Correcting for the influence of frozen lakes in satellite microwave radiometer observations through application of a microwave emission model

The spatial resolution of passive microwave observations from space is of the order of tens of kilometers with currently available instruments, such as the Special Sensor Microwave/Imager (SSM/I) and Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR-E). The large field of view of these instruments dictates that the observed brightness temperature can originate from heterogeneous land cover, with different vegetation and surface properties.In this study, we assess the influence of freshwater lakes on the observed brightness temperature of AMSR-E in winter conditions. The study focuses on the geographic region of Finland, where lakes account for 10% of the total terrestrial area. We present a method to mitigate for the influence of lakes through forward modeling of snow covered lakes, as a part of a microwave emission simulation scheme of space-borne observations. We apply a forward model to predict brightness temperatures of snow covered sceneries over several winter seasons, using available data on snow cover, vegetation and lake ice cover to set the forward model input parameters. Comparison of model estimates with space-borne observations shows that the modeling accuracy improves in the majority of examined cases when lakes are accounted for, with respect to the case where lakes are not included in the simulation. Moreover, we present a method for applying the correction to the retrieval of Snow Water Equivalent (SWE) in lake-rich areas, using a numerical inversion method of the forward model. In a comparison to available independent validation data on SWE, also the retrieval accuracy is seen to improve when applying the influence of snow covered lakes in the emission model.     

Volatile monocarbonyl compounds of carrot roots at various stages of maturity

Summary Volatile carbonyl compounds of carrot varietyFeonia Hunderup S-64 at various stages of maturity were analysed as their 2,4-DNPH's by a combined TLC-GLC-MS method. Twenty-three different carbonyl compounds were identified, of which undecanal, buten-2-al, methylbutenal, pentan-2-one, 6-methyl-5-hepten-2-one and 5-methylfurfural have not previously been found in carrot. During maturation the content of acetaldehyde and acetone increased significantly, while that of methylbutenal decreased.

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Die leichtflüchtigen Monocarbonylverbindungen der Karotten in verschiedenen Stufen der Reife

Zusammenfassung Die leichtflüchtigen Carbonylverbindungen der Karotten Varietät Feonia Hunderup S-64 wurden in verschiedenen Stufen der Reife als 2,4-DNPH mit der kombinierten DC-GC-MS-Methode analysiert. Dreiundzwanzig verschiedene Carbonylverbindungen wurden nachgewiesen. Von diesen sind Undecanal, 2-Butenal, Methylbutenal, 2-Pentanon, 6-Methyl-5-hepten-2-on und 5-Methylfurfural noch nicht in Karotten aufgefunden worden. Während des Reifens nahm der Gehalt an Acetaldehyd und Aceton bedeutend zu. Der Gehalt an Methylbutenal verminderte sich.

     

Feasibility of multi-temporal interferometric SAR data for stand-level estimation of boreal forest stem volume

The feasibility of interferometric SAR (INSAR) coherence observations for stem volume (biomass) retrieval is investigated by applying coherence data determined from 14 ERS-1 and ERS-2 C-band SAR image pairs. The image set covers a single forested test area in Finland, and both summer (snow-free) and winter conditions are represented. The data set enabled (a) the study of stem volume retrieval performance under varying conditions, (b) the analysis of the seasonal behavior of interferometric coherence, and (c) the determination of the accuracy characteristics of empirical (nonlinear) coherence modeling. Additionally, a new technique to estimate forest stem volume from INSAR data was developed based on constrained iterative inversion of the applied empirical model. The results indicate that the usability of winter images with snow-covered terrain is superior to that of images obtained under summer conditions. The applied empirical model appears to be adequate for describing the stand-wise coherence of boreal forest. Hence, a practical stem volume estimation method can be established based on it. The highest correlation coefficient between the estimated stem volume and the ground truth stem volume showed values as high as r=0.9 and a relative RMSE level of 48% was obtained, respectively.     

BOAR: an advanced HW/SW coemulation environment for DSP system development

The BOAR emulation system is targeted to hardware/software (HW/SW) codevelopment of advanced embedded DSP and telecom systems. The challenge of the BOAR system is efficient customization of programmable hardware, and dedicated partitioning routine to target applications and structures, which allows quite high overall system performance. The system allows multiple configurations for communication between processors and field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) making the BOAR system an efficient tool for real-time HW/SW coverification. The reprogrammable hardware of the emulation tool is based on four Xilinx 4000-series devices, two Texas TMS320C50 signal processors and one Motorola MC68302 microcontroller. With current devices the BOAR hardware provides approximately 40–70 kgates of logic capacity in DSP applications. The emulation capacity can be expanded by connecting several similar boards in chain. The system has also a versatile internal reprogrammable test environment for test bench development, performance evaluations and design debugging. The logic development environment is based on the Synopsys synthesis tools and an automatic design management software, which performs resource mapping and performance-driven design partitioning between FPGAs. The emulation hardware is currently connected to logic and software development environments via an RS-232C bus. The BOAR emulation system has been found a very efficient platform for real-life prototyping of different types of DSP algorithms and systems, and validating correct functionality of a VHDL macro library.