Grignard Reagents and Non‐Precious Metals: Cheap and Eco‐Friendly Reagents for Developing Industrial Cross‐Couplings. A Personal Account

Grignard reagents are probably the best organometallics to develop large‐scale eco‐friendly cross‐couplings compatible with the requirements of sustainable development. This account aims to highlight some reactions having an interesting industrial potential and gives the personal point of view of the authors on some attractive fields of research in this area.

     

Athermal concentration by osmotic evaporation of roselle extract, apple and grape juices and impact on quality

Osmotic evaporation (or osmotic distillation) was carried out on roselle extract, apple and grape juices. The industrial pilot plant used had a hydrophobic, polypropylene, hollow-fiber membrane with an area of 10.2 m² and an average pore diameter of 0.2 μm. It was suitable for concentrating vegetable extracts and fruit juices, and controlled various parameters such as temperature, flow velocity, and brine concentration. The final total soluble solids (TSS) contents achieved were 660, 570, and 610 g kg⁻¹ for grape juice, apple juice, and roselle extract, respectively. Temperature and concentration of solutions significantly influenced evaporation flux, which, for roselle extract, was 1.5 kg h⁻¹ m⁻² at 610 g TSS kg⁻¹ and 45 °C. The physico-chemical, biochemical, and aromatic qualities of concentrates obtained by osmotic evaporation were much higher than those of thermal concentrates, and close to those of the initial products.

Industrial relevance

Membrane processes are increasingly used to concentrate thermo-sensitive fruit juices and plant extracts. Their capacity to operate at moderate temperatures and pressures means that their energy consumption is low, while they produce good quality concentrates. Nonetheless, the main disadvantage of baromembrane processes is their inability to reach the concentration levels standard for products of thermal evaporation because of limitations resulting from high osmotic pressure. Actually, reverse osmosis membranes and equipment limit the final concentration of fruit juices to about 25–35°Brix. Osmotic evaporation has attracted considerable interest, as it can concentrate juices to as much as 65°Brix. This process, when applied to various juices, better preserves the quality of raw materials. However, because of the geometrical limitations of commercially available membranes and modules, juices must first be clarified. To our knowledge, only a few studies on osmotic evaporation have so far been conducted at a semi-industrial scale and never with roselle extracts.     

A new insight into Bluetooth piconets coexistence

This paper discusses Bluetooth piconets coexistence. We use an approach which is totally different from those used traditionally with Bluetooth (probabilistic collision models). We show how it is possible to obtain an interference‐free Bluetooth environment in some conditions, for certain kinds of Bluetooth devices, using the properties of the Bluetooth frequency hopping system. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Machine Learning With Data Assimilation and Uncertainty Quantification for Dynamical Systems: A Review

Data assimilation (DA) and uncertainty quantification (UQ) are extensively used in analysing and reducing error propagation in high-dimensional spatial-temporal dynamics. Typical applications span from computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to geoscience and climate systems. Recently, much effort has been given in combining DA, UQ and machine learning (ML) techniques. These research efforts seek to address some critical challenges in high-dimensional dynamical systems, including but not limited to dynamical system identification, reduced order surrogate modelling, error covariance specification and model error correction. A large number of developed techniques and methodologies exhibit a broad applicability across numerous domains, resulting in the necessity for a comprehensive guide. This paper provides the first overview of state-of-the-art researches in this interdisciplinary field, covering a wide range of applications. This review is aimed at ML scientists who attempt to apply DA and UQ techniques to improve the accuracy and the interpretability of their models, but also at DA and UQ experts who intend to integrate cutting-edge ML approaches to their systems. Therefore, this article has a special focus on how ML methods can overcome the existing limits of DA and UQ, and vice versa. Some exciting perspectives of this rapidly developing research field are also discussed.      

Computable processes and bisimulation equivalence

A process is calledcomputable if it can be modelled by a transition system that has a recursive structure—implying finite branching. The equivalence relation between transition systems considered is strong bisimulation equivalence. The transition systems studied in this paper can be associated to processes specified in common specification languages such as CCS, LOTOS, ACP and PSF. As a means for defining transition systems up to bisimulation equivalence, the specification languageCRL is used. Two simple fragments of,CRL are singled out, yielding universal expressivity with respect to recursive and primitive recursive transition systems. For both these domains the following properties are classified in the arithmetical hierarchy:bisimilarity, perpetuity (both ₁ ⁰ ),regularity (having a bisimilar, finite representation, ₂ ⁰ ),acyclic regularity ( ₁ ⁰ ), anddeadlock freedom (distinguishing deadlock from successful termination, ₁ ⁰ ). Finally, it is shown that in the domain of primitive recursive transition systems over a fixed, finite label set, a genuine hierarchy in bisimilarity can be defined by the complexity of the witnessing relations, which extends r.e. bisimilarity. Hence, primitive recursive transition systems already form an interesting class.     

Serre’s reduction of linear partial differential systems with holonomic adjoints

Given a linear functional system (e.g., an ordinary/partial differential system, a differential time-delay system, a difference system), Serre’s reduction aims at finding an equivalent linear functional system which contains fewer equations and fewer unknowns. The purpose of this paper is to study Serre’s reduction of underdetermined linear systems of partial differential equations with either polynomial, formal power series or locally convergent power series coefficients, and with holonomic adjoints in the sense of algebraic analysis. We prove that these linear partial differential systems can be defined by means of only one linear partial differential equation. In the case of polynomial coefficients, we give an algorithm to compute the corresponding equation.