Enhancing urban infrastructure investment planning practices for a changing climate.

Climate change raises many concerns for urban water management because of the effects on all aspects of the hydrological cycle. Urban water infrastructure has traditionally been designed using historical observations and assuming stationary climatic conditions. The capability of this infrastructure, whether for storm-water drainage, or water supply, may be over- or under-designed for future climatic conditions. In particular, changes in the frequency and intensity of extreme rainfall events will have the most acute effect on storm-water drainage systems. Therefore, it is necessary to take future climatic conditions into consideration in engineering designs in order to enhance water infrastructure investment planning practices in a long time horizon. This paper provides the initial results of a study that is examining ways to enhance urban infrastructure investment planning practices against changes in hydrologic regimes for a changing climate. Design storms and intensity-duration-frequency curves that are used in the engineering design of storm-water drainage systems are developed under future climatic conditions by empirically adjusting the general circulation model output, and using the Gumbel distribution and the Chicago method. Simulations are then performed on an existing storm-water drainage system from NE Calgary to investigate the resiliency of the system under climate change.     

Synthesis and characterization of conducting copolymers from aniline and o‐anisidine in HCl solutions

Conducting poly(aniline‐co‐o‐anisidine) (PAS) films with different ratios of aniline units in the polymer chain were prepared by oxidative polymerization of different molar ratios of aniline and o‐anisidine in 1 M HCl using cyclic voltammetry. Due to the much higher reactivity of o‐anisidine, the structure and properties of PASs were found to be dominated by the o‐anisidine units. The polymerization of poly‐o‐anisidine and PASs followed zero‐order kinetics with respect to formation of the polymer (film thickness) and the autocatalytic polymerization of aniline was completely inhibited. In contrast to polyaniline, a decrease in the polymerization temperature was found to increase the amount of copolymer formed and its redox charge. The presence of aniline units in PASs led to a pronounced increase in the molecular weight and conductivity, and a decrease in the solubility in organic solvents. Repetitive charging/discharging cycles showed that PASs resist degradation more than polyaniline. Copyright © 2003 Society of Chemical Industry     

Cholesterol‐imprinted polymer receptor prepared by a hybrid imprinting method

A novel cholesterol‐imprinted polymer (CMIP‐H) was prepared by a hybrid method of covalent imprinting and non‐covalent imprinting. This approach involves the copolymerization of a template‐containing monomer, cholesteryl 2‐hydroxyethyl methacrylate carbonate, and a cross‐linker, followed by hydrolysis to afford a flexible guest‐binding site accompanied with the easy and efficient removal of a ‘sacrificial spacer’. The effect of solvent on the binding capacity of CMIP‐H towards cholesterol was studied, indicating that a good binding capacity towards cholesterol could be achieved in a less‐polar solvent. The binding experiments of CMIP‐H towards a series of structural analogues of cholesterol, including cholesterol acetate, progesterone and stigmasterol, were carried out in hexane. The results showed that CMIP‐H almost did not bind cholesterol acetate at all because the hydrogen‐bonding site is blocked. It exhibited a similar binding towards both cholesterol and stigmasterol, but much higher binding towards progesterone. Copyright © 2005 Society of Chemical Industry     

提高开卷线纵剪机精度的研究

通过对纵剪机右立柱轴承间隙测量方法和左立柱导向结构的改进，保证了加工精度，易于操作，提高了生产效率。     

Real-time measurement of pointing action by using DSP

This paper presents an approach of measuring in real-time the vector of finger that is pointing to an object. DSP is used in the operation processing unit in order to do the real-time processing. The steps include the extraction of flesh-colored regions from an image, the labeling of the flesh-colored regions, and the detection of two characteristic positions on the finger so that the direction that the finger is pointing at will be calculated. The entire process takes about 29 msec, which makes it possible to have the frame rate of 34 fps. With this frame rate, this measurement approach is considered real-time and promising to be merged into other application systems. This work was presented in part at the 13th International Symposium on Artificial Life and Robotics, Oita, Japan, January 31–February 2, 2008     

Microfabricated liquid chromatography columns based on collocated monolith support structures

There is great interest today in massively parallel analytical strategies as a way to accelerate the rate of discovery in biological research; among them being 'biochips' and 'laboratories-on-a-chip'. The concept in the 'chip' approach is that minaturization will allow large numbers of operations to be performed in parallel in a small space, as in electronics. Proceeding with the semiconductor analogy, this paper demonstrates that in situ micromachining can be used to simultaneously fabricate millions of micrometer size, particle like structures in multiple liquid chromatography columns on a single wafer. Reduction of this widely used bioanalytical tool to the nanoliter volume, parallel processing, chip format is a significant step toward laboratories-on-a-chip.