Determination of the Young's modulus of coke – a novel method

Based on the Hertz contact problem of two cylinders a method was developed to determine Young's modulus of brittle materials, e.g. coke, from the indirect tensile test. The error band to be taken into account for evaluation have been discussed. As far as chamber-oven cokes are concerned, it was possible to derive Young's moduli, which correlated well with the values found by other authors by means of static measuring methods. In addition was determined, on a semi-empiric basis, a linear relation between Young's modulus and porosity, – relation allowing to consider the influence of coke structure as well.     

A highly integrated 40-MIPS (peak) 64-b RISC microprocessor

A 1-million transistor 64-b microprocessor has been fabricated using 0.8-μm double-metal CMOS technology. A 40-MIPS (million instructions per second) and 20-MFLOPS (million floating-point operations per second) peak performance at 40 MHz is realized by a self-clocked register file and two translation lookaside buffers (TLBs) with word-line transition detection circuits. The processor contains an integer unit based on the SPARC (scalable processor architecture) RISC (reduced instruction set computer) architecture, a floating-point unit (FPU) which executes IEEE-754 single- and double-precision floating-point operations a 6-KB three-way set-associative physical instruction cache, a 2-KB two-way set-associative physical data cache, a memory management unit that has two TLBs, and a bus control unit with an ECC (error-correcting code) circuit     

Quantum-Mechanical Properties of Protons in Solid Molecular Hydrogen at Megabar Pressures

Quantum distributions of protons in three high-pressure phases of solid molecular hydrogen are investigated by the first-principles path integral molecular dynamics (FP-PIMD) method, in which interatomic forces are calculated precisely based on the density functional theory. The distributions have entirely different symmetries from those predicted by conventional simulation with classical treatment of protons. Especially in phase II, we found that molecular rotation is hindered by quantum fluctuation of protons, having a strong resemblance to a quantum distribution of impurity muonium in crystalline silicon. The mechanism of this “quantum localization” is clarified by a detailed study of the potential energy surface for the molecular rotation.     

Adsorption of bovine serum albumin to a polymer brush prepared by atom-transfer radical polymerization in a porous inorganic membrane

Protein adsorption was performed by a polymer brush prepared by atom-transfer radical polymerization (ATRP) to a porous inorganic membrane. The porous inorganic membrane, Shirasu Porous Glass made from silica, was modified with a halogen-containing compound to bind the active species for the polymerization. Glycidyl methacrylate was polymerized from the halogen compound by ATRP for a prescribed time, and subsequently chemically modified. The progression of the chemical modification allowed the membrane to lower the phosphate-buffer flux of the porous membrane due to the attachment of the polymer brush. Bovine serum albumin (BSA), as a model protein, was adsorbed at 12 mg per gram of the membrane in permeating BSA solution through the polymer-brush-attached porous membrane.     

Swelling and dehydration characteristics of transition metal ion-exchanged taeniolites

The swelling and dehydration characteristics of Mn²⁺, Ni²⁺, Cu²⁺ and Zn²⁺ ion-substituted taeniolites with the exchange ratios of 85% and 78% have been investigated by high-temperature X-ray diffractometry, thermogravimetry-differential thermal analysis and calorimetry. The transition metal forms are the swelling states with two water-molecule layers at room temperature and a relative humidity of 70%, and their dehydration processes to the swelling states with a half water-molecule layer were concluded from the experimental results, to depend on the kind of the interlayer cations. In particular, the new swelling state with three-quarters water-molecule layers, showing a rational series of the basal reflections, was discovered to exist stably in the dehydration processes of manganese and nickel forms. The heat of swelling with water attains a maximum at a temperature corresponding to the appearance of the swelling state with a half water-molecule layer. The calorific value for the copper form was measured to be much larger than those for manganese, nickel and zinc forms.     

Anisotropic corrosion of iron in pH 1 sulphuric acid

Anisotropic corrosion behaviour of a single grain of pure iron in 0.05 mol dm⁻³ sulphuric acid (pH 1) was investigated by a simple polarization technique. Both corrosion potential and corrosion current were found to be dependent on crystallographic orientation of the iron grain. A high corrosion current flowed on a grain showing a relatively noble corrosion potential, although both cathodic and anodic Tafel slopes were independent of the orientation. It was shown that cathodic hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) governed the corrosion reaction on the iron grain. Covalent bonding of Fe and H and coverage of H on Fe seem to play important roles in the HER and anisotropic corrosion behaviour of pure iron.