Energy efficiency, carbon emissions and economic development in Venezuela

Venezuela's vast natural resource base has largely shaped the nation's economic and energy-use patterns. Major opportunities exist for improving the efficiency of energy use in Venezuela and, consequently, restraining the growth of energy-related carbon emissions. This paper presents a detailed report of one potential development path for Venezuela and estimates the ensuing levels of energy demand and CO₂ emissions associated with pursuing this path through the year 2025. The results indicate that by adopting a development strategy that incorporates structural changes in the economy, fuel-switching measures and improved end-use efficiencies, Venezuela can introduce energy efficiency and carbon restraints as part of its economic development process.     

Experiments of Fast Learning with High Order Boltzmann Machines

This work reports the results obtained with the application of High Order Boltzmann Machines without hidden units to construct classifiers for some problems that represent different learning paradigms. The Boltzmann Machine weight updating algorithm remains the same even when some of the units can take values in a discrete set or in a continuous interval. The absence of hidden units and the restriction to classification problems allows for the estimation of the connection statistics, without the computational cost involved in the application of simulated annealing. In this setting, the learning process can be sped up several orders of magnitude with no appreciable loss of quality of the results obtained.     

The effects of behavioral tasks on the in vitro phosphorylation of intermediate filament subunits of rat hippocampus are mediated by CaMKII and PKA

In the homodimeric hemoglobin from Scapharca, HbI, functional communication between the two heme groups is based on their direct structural linkage across the subunit interface through the heme propionates. The heme-protein interactions have been altered in deutero- and meso-HbI by substituting the vinyl groups at positions 2 and 4 of protoheme with hydrogen and ethyl groups, respectively. In meso-HbI the introduction of the ethyl groups in the heme pocket induces significant alterations in the conformation of the heme peripheral substituents, including the propionates, and in the structure of bound CO, as revealed by the resonance Raman spectra. The functional counterpart of these structural changes is the loss of cooperativity in carbon monoxide binding and in the rate of oxygen dissociation. Oxygen pulse and flash photolysis experiments indicate that meso-HbI is locked in the liganded conformation. It is postulated that the ethyl groups, which occupy a larger volume than vinyl ones, impair the ligand-linked movement of the heme relative to its pocket and in turn the expression of cooperativity. In deutero-HbI structural alterations have not been monitored. Functionally, cooperativity in the CO binding kinetics is increased as if hydrogen atoms at positions 2 and 4 permitted more marked movements of the heme than in the native protein.     

Instability of zeolite Y supported cobalt sulfide hydrotreating catalysts in the absence of H2S

Ion exchanged CoNaY was sulfided at 473 and 673 K and subsequently heated in He at 673 and 773 K. The resulting samples were characterized by means of overall sulfur analysis, temperature programmed Ar treatment and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy. It was shown that during He flushing at sufficiently high temperature a protolysis reaction occurs resulting in the decomposition of Co sulfide into Co²⁺ ions and H₂S.     

Multi-level simulation of metal-forming processes

The IBF has for some years made use of finite element programmes to solve metal-forming problems. In the course of this investigation, it has become evident that a problem-oriented adaptation of FEM simulation to the problem in hand is beneficial in terms of computation effort. The computation time for the process parameters is optimised in a multi-level simulation. At level 1 (global analysis) integral parameters such as the required force and required work are computed using a coarse FEM mesh. At level 2 (local analysis) an optimised number of elements is used to determine continuum mechanics parameters like stress, strain and temperature. Microscopic phenomena are simulated at level 3 (microscopic analysis), using special micro-material elements and thermodynamic models.     

Transient operation of a catalytic liquid-liquid plug flow reactor for kinetics measurements

A centrifugal partition chromatograph (CPC) was used as a liquid-liquid catalytic reactor for the isomerisation of hexen-3-ol into ethylpropylketone with a water soluble rhodium catalyst. Global mass transfer coefficients were measured and shown to depend on both the nature of the solute and the flow rate. Liquid-liquid partition isotherms were also determined with the CPC using elution chromatography. Finally, a reactor model was derived to account for the experimental results obtained both under stationary and transient (pulse) conditions. A parameter sensitivity evaluation is also presented.