Bioavailability and Toxicity of Metal Nutrients during Anaerobic Digestion

This paper investigates the effect of chelating agents on the bioavailability of Fe and Cu during anaerobic digestion. The results on metal speciation and methane production in anaerobic serum bottles showed that biomass was able to grow in the presence of citrate 1?mM and nitrilotriacetic acid (NTA) 1?mM, suggesting that the binding sites at the cell surface competed efficiently for the metals with the chelating agents added. The presence of free ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid 1?mM inhibited methanogenesis, and this seemed to be related to a loss in metal uptake capacity. Although the addition of soluble microbial products (SMP) did not change metal distribution in anaerobic systems, it caused an increase in the rate of methane production, and it is believed that direct uptake of Cu-SMP complexes was responsible for this increase. The best protection against Cu toxicity occurred when stoichiometric amounts of NTA, which should complex and solubilize most of the Cu, was added, and it is likely that NTA prevented lethal concentrations of Cu from being adsorbed onto the cell and hence internalized.     

Proposed Design of a CFRP Flange-to-Flange Connection for Precast Prestressed Double Tee Systems

The current methods of connecting the flanges of precast double tee members, and their respective short comings in specific situations, are described. A new carbon fiber-reinforced polymer (CFRP) flange-to-flange connection is proposed to eliminate the problems associated with repair requirements for the current connections. Design expressions for the currently used mechanical anchorage and the proposed CFRP connection are presented. A comparative calculation for the two systems is given.     

Vertical Vibration of a Flexible Plate with Rigid Core on Saturated Ground

In this paper, the vertical vibration of a flexible plate with rigid core resting on a semi-infinite saturated soil is studied analytically. The behavior of the soil is assumed to follow Biot’s poroelastodynamic theory with compressible soil skeleton and pore water, and the response of the time-harmonic excited plate is governed by the classical thin-plate theory. By virtue of the Hankel transform technique, the fundamental solutions of the skeleton displacements, stresses, and pore pressure are derived, and a set of dual integral equations associated with the relaxed boundary and completely drained condition at the soil-foundation contact interface are also developed. These governing integral equations are further reduced to the standard Fredholm integral equations of the second kind and solved by numerical procedures. Comparison with existing solutions for a rigid permeable plate on saturated soil confirms the accuracy of the present solution. Selected numerical results are presented to show the influence of the permeability, the size of the rigid core, and the plate flexibility on the dynamic interaction between the elastic plate with rigid core and the underlying saturated soil.     

Ab<Emphasis Type="Italic"> initio</Emphasis> investigation of boron diffusion paths in germanium

Boron is observed to diffuse very slowly in germanium, as opposed to its behaviour in silicon where it exhibits Transient Enhanced Diffusion effects in implanted samples. As a result of this slow diffusion, boron is a very stable dopant, allowing devices to be created with very well-defined doping regions. To understand this superior performance, calculations were performed on a variety of boron diffusion paths, within vacancy and interstitial mediated methods. It was found that the vacancy mediated diffusion which is associated with the fast diffusion of many other species in germanium exhibits a total barrier of 5.8 eV. Interstitial-mediated diffusion had a total barrier for migration of 3.4 eV in the neutral and singly negative charge states, 3.2 eV for the positive charge state, but a formation barrier of 4.1 eV. Thus the barrier for interstitial-mediated diffusion is dominated by the formation energy of the self-interstitial.     

Dialogical Argument as an Interface to Complex Debates

The Magtalo prototype environment harnesses dialogue protocols to support flexible, intuitive interaction with data in complex, contentious domains and provides mechanisms for eliciting structured knowledge. Magtalo represents the first example of an implemented online system that uses a closely specified argument-based dialogue protocol combined with a rich language for representing monologic argument to provide a tool for intuitive user exploration of a disagreement space. This approach also enables the expansion of argument resources through knowledge elicitation, which is structured by the argument dialogue protocol. The continuing aim of our research is to use advances in argumentation theory to push the practice of argumentation technology in providing tools and interfaces that have wide appeal.     

Cross-Layer Packetization and Retransmission Strategies for Delay-Sensitive Wireless Multimedia Transmission

Existing wireless networks provide dynamically varying resources with only limited support for the quality of service required by the bandwidth-intense, loss-tolerant and delay-sensitive multimedia applications. This variability of resources does not significantly impact delay insensitive data transmission (e.g., file transfers), but has considerable consequences for multimedia applications. Recently, the research focus has been to adapt existing algorithms and protocols at the lower layers of the protocol stack to better support multimedia transmission applications and conversely, to modify application layer solutions to cope with the varying wireless networks resources. In this paper, we show that significant improvements in wireless multimedia performance can be obtained by deploying a joint application-layer adaptive packetization and prioritized scheduling and MAC-layer retransmission strategy. We deploy a state-of-the-art wavelet coder for the compression of the video data that enables on-the-fly adaptation to changing channel conditions and inherent prioritization of the video bitstream. We pose the cross-layer problem as a distortion minimization given delay constraints and derive analytical solutions by modifying existing joint source-channel coding theory aimed at fulfilling rate, rather than delay, constraints. We also propose real-time algorithms that explicitly consider the available information about previously transmitted packets. The obtained results show significant improvements in terms of video quality as opposed to ad-hoc optimizations currently deployed, while the complexity associated with performing this optimization in real time, i.e., at transmission time, is limited