Antimony removal from dilute solutions using a restrained bed electrochemical reactor

The electrochemical removal of Antimony from 1m sulphuric acid in a restrained bed reactor was studied in terms of current, flow velocity, bed depth, bead size and pressure drop. Current efficiencies are quoted as a function of current density and information is given so that they may be calculated in terms of the above variables. Experimentally-obtained limiting current densities are compared with calculated values, using empirical formulae from the literature.     

Anisotropy of ductile fracture in hot-rolled steel plates-an application of the upset test

Upset testing of cylindrical specimens generates circumferential tensile stresses at the barreled surfaces. These stresses can be utilized in the same manner as the tensile stresses in the tension test to evaluate the ductility of materials. Using the upset test method, the anisotropy of ductile fracture in AISI 1045 hot-rolled steel plates was determined. Ductility parallel to the plane of inclusions is found to be ≈ 50 pet higher than that perpendicular to the inclusions. It is shown that the local surface strains at fracture in upset testing correlate well with the true zero-gage-length fracture strain in tension testing, provided the tensile stresses in the respective tests are in the same direction relative to the inclusion orientation. Thus, compression tests parallel to the inclusion direction, which generate tensile stresses perpendicular to the inclusions, can be utilized to measure ductility transverse to the fiber of wrought materials. This is particularly useful in determining the short transverse or through-thickness ductility in hot-rolled or forged materials having thin sections.     

Deriving tabular event-based specifications from goal-oriented requirements models

Goal-oriented methods are increasingly popular for elaborating software requirements. They offer systematic support for incrementally building intentional, structural and operational models of the software and its environment. They also provide various techniques for early analysis, notably, to manage conflicting goals or to anticipate abnormal environment behaviours that prevent goals from being achieved. On the other hand, tabular event-based methods are well-established for specifying operational requirements for control software. They provide sophisticated techniques and tools for late analysis of software behaviour models through simulation, model checking or table exhaustiveness checks. The paper proposes to take the best out of these two worlds to engineer requirements for control software. It presents a technique for deriving event-based specifications, written in the SCR tabular language, from operational specifications built according to the KAOS goal-oriented method. The technique consists of a series of transformation steps each of which resolves semantic, structural or syntactic differences between the KAOS source language and the SCR target language. Some of these steps need human intervention and illustrate the kind of semantic subtleties that need to be taken into account when integrating multiple formalisms. As a result of our technique SCR specifiers may use upstream goal-based processes à la KAOS for the incremental elaboration, early analysis, organization and documentation of their tables, while KAOS modelers may use downstream tables à la SCR for later analysis of the behaviour models derived from goal specifications.     

Monolayer assemblies with functional units of sensitizing and conducting molecular components: Photovoltage,dark conduction and photoconduction in systems with aluminium and barium electrodes

Vectorial charge separation was studied in assemblies in which a mixed monolayer of an indocarbocyanine dye with the chromophores in the layer plane, a chain-like π electron system oriented perpendicular to the layer plane, and a layer of acceptor molecules were sandwiched between metal electrodes. The cyanine dye was excited by light and the excited electron could move via the π electron system and the acceptor to the positively biased electrode.The logarithm of the photocurrent increases linearly with the bias voltage. If the conducting π electron system and the acceptor are absent, the photocurrent is about an order of magnitude smaller and its logarithm depends linearly on the square root of the bias voltage. In both cases the photocurrent is proportional to the light intensity and shows the same temperature dependence. The results are interpreted by assuming that the excited electron is transferred to some interlayer state by tunnelling (low temperature mode) or by thermal activation (high temperature mode). In the absence of the conducting element and the acceptor the electron moves to the positively biased electrode with a low probability. In their presence the electron is transferred to the interlayer states spaced one monolayer away from this electrode, and then tunnelling from there to the electrode is rate limiting.If these arrangements are sandwiched between metals of very different work functions (aluminium and barium) a photovoltage can be measured and is interpreted as being caused by a vectorial electron transfer through the molecular functional unit towards the metal with the smaller work function.The dark conductivity through fatty acid multilayers sandwiched between an aluminium and a barium electrode was measured and was interpreted. The hopping of electrons between interlayer states adjacent to the aluminium electrode is rate limiting.     

Strategic technology planning in hospital management

Abstract. Hospital managers regularly are confronted with their patients' demand for increased service performance on the one hand and tight budgets on the other. As medical technologies influence both the costs and the service spectrum, strategic technology planning is among the critical tasks in hospital management. This paper addresses the corresponding problem of selecting the “best” portfolio of medical devices and proposes an appropriate decision support system. It starts with a multiobjective mathematical programming model that determines the solution space of all efficient portfolios of medical technology investments. The members of the planning committee with their diverging interests then are supported by their interactive exploration of that space until they jointly reach a satisfying portfolio and are not willing to make any further compromises between its objective levels. As one of its salient features the system does not require a priori preference information. RID="*" ID="*" A previous version of this paper has been presented at the Wiesbaden 2000 Meeting of the GOR-Working Group “Operations Research in Health Care”. The authors thank Andrea Lührs and Thomas Rollins, both from Siemens AG, for their valuable support. Moreover, thanks are due to the anonymous referees for their comments on a previous version of this paper. Correspondence to: C. Stummer     

Parallel partitioning for distributed systems using sequential assignment

This paper introduces a method to combine the advantages of both task parallelism and fine-grained co-design specialisation to achieve faster execution times than either method alone on distributed heterogeneous architectures. The method uses a novel mixed integer linear programming formalisation to assign code sections from parallel tasks to share computational components with the optimal trade-off between acceleration from component specialism and serialisation delay. The paper provides results for software benchmarks partitioned using the method and formal implementations of previous alternatives to demonstrate both the practical tractability of the linear programming approach and the increase in program acceleration potential deliverable.     

THE QSM ALGORITHM AND ITS APPLICATION TO SOFTWARE BEHAVIOR MODEL INDUCTION

This article presents a novel application of grammatical inference techniques to the synthesis of behavior models of software systems. This synthesis is used for the elicitation of software requirements. This problem is formulated as a deterministic finite-state automaton induction problem from positive and negative scenarios provided by an end user of the software-to-be. A query-driven state merging (QSM) algorithm is proposed. It extends the Regular Positive and Negative Inference (RPNI) and blue-fringe algorithms by allowing membership queries to be submitted to the end user. State merging operations can be further constrained by some prior domain knowledge formulated as fluents, goals, domain properties, and models of external software components. The incorporation of domain knowledge both reduces the number of queries and guarantees that the induced model is consistent with such knowledge. The proposed techniques are implemented in the ISIS tool and practical evaluations on standard requirements engineering test cases and synthetic data illustrate the interest of this approach.