RANDOM EXPERIMENTS ON ENAMEL ADHERENCE*

The results of various experiments dealing with the behavior of ground-coat enamels are given. Hydrogen causes metallic nickel or iron to separate from regular molten ground coats, while the gases evolved from sheet iron cause metallic copper to form from molten copper-bearing glasses and metallic iron to form from regular molten ground coats. Ground coats have only a slight volatilization loss at 1600°F. Because CuO decomposes when heated in absence of oxygen or with iron or FeO, the various experiments performed suggest that glass solutions of CuO are oxidizing and are reduced by such reducing agents as H₂, CO, FeO, CoO, NiO, MnO, and Fe.     

Stress and strain in staphylococcal nuclease

Protein molecules generally adopt a tertiary structure in which all backbone and side chain conformations are arranged in local energy minima; however, in several well-refined protein structures examples of locally strained geometries, such as cis peptide bonds, have been observed. Staphylococcal nuclease A contains a single cis peptide bond between residues Lys 116 and Pro 117 within a type VIa beta-turn. Alternative native folded forms of nuclease A have been detected by NMR spectroscopy and attributed to a mixture of cis and trans isomers at the Lys 116-Pro 117 peptide bond. Analyses of nuclease variants K116G and K116A by NMR spectroscopy and X-ray crystallography are reported herein. The structure of K116A is indistinguishable from that of nuclease A, including a cis 116-117 peptide bond (92% populated in solution). The overall fold of K116G is also indistinguishable from nuclease A except in the region of the substitution (residues 112-117), which contains a predominantly trans Gly 116-Pro 117 peptide bond (80% populated in solution). Both Lys and Ala would be prohibited from adopting the backbone conformation of Gly 116 due to steric clashes between the beta-carbon and the surrounding residues. One explanation for these results is that the position of the ends of the residue 112-117 loop only allow trans conformations where the local backbone interactions associated with the phi and psi torsion angles are strained. When the 116-117 peptide bond is cis, less strained backbone conformations are available. Thus the relaxation of the backbone strain intrinsic to the trans conformation compensates for the energetically unfavorable cis X-Pro peptide bond. With the removal of the side chain from residue 116 (K116G), the backbone strain of the trans conformation is reduced to the point that the conformation associated with the cis peptide bond is no longer favorable.     

Fiber Bragg Gratings in Small-Core Ge-Doped Photonic Crystal Fibers

This paper reports fiber Bragg gratings （FBGs） inscribed in a small-core Ge-doped photonic crystal fibers with a UV laser and a Talbot interferometer. The responses of such FBGs to temper- ature, strain, bending, and transverse-loading were systematically investigated. The Bragg wavelength of the FBGs shifts toward longer wavelengths with increasing temperature, tensile strain, and transverse-loading. The bending and transverse- loading properties of the FBGs are sensitive to the fiber orientations.     

Premixed hydrogen-air combustion system for fuel cell systems

The advance of efficient hydrogen-air combustion systems has increasingly become of interest in the framework of the development of fuel cell systems, especially for the automotive sector. Therefore, compact modulating systems are required, with the additional demand of low emissions, to be integrated in a fuel cell system. A modulating combustion system based on combustion within inert porous media and an integrated heat exchanger has been developed and investigated. The system is able to handle premixed combustion of lean H₂/air mixtures at a surface load range of 1075 kW/m²-2150 kW/m², and a global equivalence ratio of ?=0.5. The special hydrogen-air mixing concept eliminates the risk of flame flashback and enables operation with very low NO_x emissions.     

Intercalating Ti2Nb14O39 Anode Materials for Fast‐Charging,High‐Capacity and Safe Lithium–Ion Batteries

Ti–Nb–O binary oxide materials represent a family of promising intercalating anode materials for lithium‐ion batteries. In additional to their excellent capacities (388–402 mAh g^–1), these materials show excellent safety characteristics, such as an operating potential above the lithium plating voltage and minimal volume change. Herein, this study reports a new member in the Ti–Nb–O family, Ti₂Nb₁₄O₃₉, as an advanced anode material. Ti₂Nb₁₄O₃₉ porous spheres (Ti₂Nb₁₄O₃₉‐S) exhibit a defective shear ReO₃ crystal structure with a large unit cell volume and a large amount of cation vacancies (0.85% vs all cation sites). These morphological and structural characteristics allow for short electron/Li⁺‐ion transport length and fast Li⁺‐ion diffusivity. Consequently, the Ti₂Nb₁₄O₃₉‐S material delivers significant pseudocapacitive behavior and excellent electrochemical performances, including high reversible capacity (326 mAh g^?1 at 0.1 C), high first‐cycle Coulombic efficiency (87.5%), safe working potential (1.67 V vs Li/Li⁺), outstanding rate capability (223 mAh g^–1 at 40 C) and durable cycling stability (only 0.032% capacity loss per cycle over 200 cycles at 10 C). These impressive results clearly demonstrate that Ti₂Nb₁₄O₃₉‐S can be a promising anode material for fast‐charging, high capacity, safe and stable lithium‐ion batteries.     

Fireside corrosion and ferritic/austenitic steels and high-alloy materials for superheaters,especially reheaters of coal-fired steam generators

In the past the performance of superheater and reheater tubes in coal-fired systems manufactured of ferritic and austenitic steels with respect to high-temperature corrosion has been the subject of various studies. After having adopted the steel X20 CrMo V 12 1 in the sixties the assumption was to have found a high-temperature corrosion resistant material. But already after 60,000 operating hours first tube failures occurred. As a result of the changes in fuel application at the beginning of the sixties interest in solving this problem faded, only to regain significance after the energy crisis. Already more than 20 years ago in England and the United States of America the development of tube materials having an upgraded corrosion resistance had started. Thus, e.g. compound tubes consisting of a creep-resistant tube core made of Incoloy 800 H and a cladding tube of Inconel 671 were introduced. They exhibited excellent characteristics in coal-fired units. Deutsche Babcock AG suggested to install, for test purposes, such a tube in Boiler 14, Unit 3 of Grosskraftwerk Mannheim. The test tube had safe ends of X 20 CrMO V 12 1, thus allowing a direct comparison of the two tube materials. After 22, 000 operating hours the tube was removed for examination. Wall reduction and corrosion damage was found to be extremely small. The paper will discuss this finding and the microstructure modifications in the material.     

Performance analysis of MUSIC employing conjugate symmetricbeamformers

If one incorporates a beamformer composed of conjugate centro-symmetric weight vectors as a preprocessor to an eigenstructure direction finding algorithm, a real-valued decomposition can be employed to estimate the noise and signal subspaces from the sample covariance matrix. The effect of employing the real processing methodology on the angle estimation performance of beamspace MUSIC is explored. Specifically, the distribution of the real-valued signal subspace eigenvectors is derived and used in an asymptotic analysis of the bias and variance of the MUSIC estimator. The theoretical analysis shows that processing the real part of the beamspace sample covariance matrix offers significant performance gains, in addition to the obvious computational benefit, relative to the conventional complex-valued procedure, particularly in the case of correlated sources. Monte Carlo simulations are included to verify the theoretical expressions. A trade-off study of the estimation accuracy versus the desire to provide adequate rejection of unwanted signals in a sector-based interrogation scheme for various beamforming architectures is also presented     

Elective lymph node dissection in malignant melanoma--status of color Doppler findings

Since there is still a controversial discussion about the ELND in melanoma patients, the purpose of this prospective study was to optimize the indication concerning ELND by ultrasound examinations. 144 patients with primary melanomas were checked every 3 months after excision. Echomorphologic pattern and intranodal vascularisation in the color-flow Doppler modus provide essential information for differential diagnosis. We found 47 patients (32.6%) with suspicious ultrasound lesions. 50% of these patients had no pathological clinical findings, the histological findings of excised lymph nodes were positive in all cases. It must be emphasized, however, that the group with lymph node metastases included 12 patients with low-risk-melanomas (2 x Tis, 10 x T1 < 1 mm tumor thickness). In comparison with a historical control group (141 patients), where ELND was performed routinely in high-risk-patients ( > T2), the incidence of ELND in our hospital decreased more than 50%; at the same time the percentage of detected lymph node metastases increased (twice).