Fat-simulating and accelerating solvents for polyolefins and MWD of solvent extracts of polyethylenes

Migration kinetics of straight-chain oligomers and antioxidants from several polyolefins at different temperatures into various solvents have been studied by radioactive tracer techniques. Anhydrous ethanol appears to be a well suited food-oil or liquid-fat simulant for extracting different types of migrants from polyolefins. Pure and mixed triglycerides are also good oil or fat simulants, but the triglycerides offer no simpler analytical procedures than the use of oil or fat themselves. n-Octanol may also be considered as a reasonable oil or fat simulant; however, its action depends somewhat on the choice of migrants. The accelerating action of n-heptane over that of oil or simulants is quantitatively demonstrated. The accelerating effects are greater for migration systems with lower diffusion coefficients. The diffusion coefficients for migration into n-heptane are about 20 times greater than the diffusion coefficients into ethanol or oil for otherwise identical migration systems yielding diffusion coefficients of about 10^?7 cm²s^?1 into oil or ethanol. For systems yielding diffusion coefficients into oil or ethanol of about 10^?12 cm²s^?1, the corresponding diffusion coefficients into n-heptane are about 1000 times greater. The molecular weight distributions (MWDs) of the n-heptane and ethanol extracts of polyolefins have been analysed. n-Heptane can not only accelerate the migration of the individual migrant but also remove oligomer species that are slightly soluble or present at low levels in the oil or simulant extracts.     

2-Layer Right Angle Crossing Drawings

A 2-layer drawing represents a bipartite graph where each vertex is a point on one of two parallel lines, no two vertices on the same line are adjacent, and the edges are straight-line segments. In this paper we study 2-layer drawings where any two crossing edges meet at right angle. We characterize the graphs that admit this type of drawing, provide linear-time testing and embedding algorithms, and present a polynomial-time crossing minimization technique. Also, for a given graph G and a constant k, we prove that it is $\mathcal{NP}$ -complete to decide whether G contains a subgraph of at least k edges having a 2-layer drawing with right angle crossings.     

Durability of Adhesion Between Metals and Polymers

Adequate adhesion between metals and polymers is primarily the result of chemical bonds in the boundary layer. This region, however, is subject to degradation by moisture. Three modes of deterioration are observed. The first is a largely reversible weakening effect in the polymer layer near the metal oxide surface. The structure of this layer differs from that of the bulk and is influenced by the chemical and physical properties of the surface. The second is a slow transformation of the oxide by hydration and a diffusion of oxide constituents into the polymer. This process is irreversible and is influenced by the state of the surface and chemical properties of the polymer. The third is a fast deterioration of the oxide by primary corrosion usually initiating at an unprotected edge but occasionally arising within the body of a joint.     

Chemische Methoden der Abwasser-Aufbereitung

Chemical methods of waste-water treatment. Chemical methods of waste management by oxidation can be considered for particular effluents whose constituents are degraded too slowly in conventional sewage treatment plants or which interfere with the biodegradation of other substances. Of these methods, those we have to choose from today are, in order of increasing operating temperature: oxidation with hydrogen peroxide – wet oxidation at high pressure – evaporation and combustion. None of these methods is fundamentally better than the others, i.e. none has a maximum ecological benefit coinciding with a minimum economic impact. Detailed experimental work is required to establish the limits and possibilities in each case and thus to form a basis for useful comparisons. Thermal processes are normally ruled out for low concentrations of degradable constituents in waste water because the specific energy costs per unit volume are too high; this is where hydrogen peroxide may offer advantages, especially when the proportion of these constituents fluctuates. With higher concentrations, wet oxidation can be employed; evaporation and combustion are suitable if there is also a high concentration of inorganic salts.     

Das spezifische Brechungsinkrement eines statistischen Methylmethacrylat/Benzylacrylat/Styrol-Terpolymeren

The specific refractive index increments of a random methylmethacrylate/ benzylacrylate/styrene-terpolymer and of the three corresponding homopolymers was measured in several solvents and at six different wavelengths. With the known terpolymer composition and the specific refractive index increments of the homopolymers the specific refractive index increment of the terpolymer is calculated by means of an equation formerly derived. Calculated and experimental values are compared.     

Combination of computational prescreening and experimental library construction can accelerate enzyme optimization by directed evolution

Chiral compounds can be produced efficiently by using biocatalysts. However, wild-type enzymes often do not meet the requirements of a production process, making optimization by rational design or directed evolution necessary. Here, we studied the lipase-catalyzed hydrolysis of the model substrate 1-(2-naphthyl)ethyl acetate both theoretically and experimentally. We found that a computational equivalent of alanine scanning mutagenesis based on QM/MM methodology can be applied to identify amino acid positions important for the activity of the enzyme. The theoretical results are consistent with concomitant experimental work using complete saturation mutagenesis and high-throughput screening of the target biocatalyst, a lipase from Bacillus subtilis. Both QM/MM-based calculations and molecular biology experiments identify histidine 76 as a residue that strongly affects the catalytic activity. The experiments demonstrate its important influence on enantioselectivity.     

Analytical Determination of the Distribution of Polishing Time over the Surface of Polished Tiles

Several kinds of glossiness pattern can be seen on the surface of porcelain stoneware tiles right after the polishing process, as a function of the kinematics performed by the polishing heads. For the newest generation of industrial polishing trains, where a transverse oscillation is included, there is still a great need for literature about the resulting patterns. This paper intends to find the spatial distribution of time under polishing analytically using the kinematics equations involved in the polishing process. The measured values of glossiness collected from three polished tiles are also presented. The importance of adopting a good kinematics for the polishing process has been highlighted, and the equations developed herein are useful tools for further attempts at optimizing the polishing process.     

Undecidability of accordance for open systems with unbounded message queues

We study asynchronously communicating open systems modeled as Petri nets with an interface. An accordance preorder describes when one open system can be safely replaced by another open system without affecting some behavioral property of the overall system. Although accordance is decidable for several behavioral properties if we assume a previously known bound on the maximal number of pending messages, we show that it is not decidable without this assumption.     

15 years of processing and dissemination of SPOT-VEGETATION products

Throughout the VEGETATION programme, the Flemish Institute for Technological Research (VITO) uninterruptedly hosted the prime user segment of both VEGETATION 1 and VEGETATION 2 multispectral instruments on board the Satellite Pour l’Observation de la Terre 4 (SPOT 4) and SPOT 5 satellites. Operational since the launch of SPOT 4 in March 1998, and foreseen to continue at least until the end of the SPOT 5 mission (anticipated in spring 2014), this user segment comprises a processing facility (PF), actively receiving, processing, correcting, archiving, and distributing the VEGETATION data and derived added-value products. First and foremost, the VEGETATION programme has been serving the needs of operational users – both institutional and commercial – requesting data in near-real time. However, scientific and educational users too benefited significantly, in particular from VEGETATION’s unique time series of the Earth’s land cover, and more specifically the vegetation cover. Over the years, the centralized archive houses processed data covering the equivalent of 11,000 times the Earth’s surface, and delivered more than 50 terapixels to around 10.000 users. As such, VEGETATION’s mission is a prime example of what Europe wants to achieve through the Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) initiative: truly operational services providing reliable and up-to-date information.

This article describes the processing facility, the way the data and products are archived, the different dissemination channels as well as the data policy adopted and the users served. One of the recent evolutions, the development of an entirely new product distribution facility (PDF), implemented as part of the Project for On-Board Autonomy – Vegetation (PROBA-V) user segment is discussed.     

Scalable Realistic Rendering with Many‐Light Methods

Recent years have seen increasing attention and significant progress in many‐light rendering, a class of methods for efficient computation of global illumination. The many‐light formulation offers a unified mathematical framework for the problem reducing the full lighting transport simulation to the calculation of the direct illumination from many virtual light sources. These methods are unrivaled in their scalability: they are able to produce plausible images in a fraction of a second but also converge to the full solution over time. In this state‐of‐the‐art report, we give an easy‐to‐follow, introductory tutorial of the many‐light theory; provide a comprehensive, unified survey of the topic with a comparison of the main algorithms; discuss limitations regarding materials and light transport phenomena and present a vision to motivate and guide future research. We will cover both the fundamental concepts as well as improvements, extensions and applications of many‐light rendering.