Factors affecting the activity of anammox bacteria during start up in the continuous culture reactor.

Factors affecting cultivation of extremely slow-growing bacteria (anaerobic ammonium oxidiser, doubling time 11 days) were investigated by using upflow anaerobic sludge blanket (UASB) reactors which can maintain high solid retention time. The effects of concentrations of DO, free ammonia (FA), and nitrite on activation of anammox activity were tested during the start-up period. The reactor was inoculated with granular sludge collected from a full-scale UASB reactor used for treating brewery wastewater, and sludge from a piggery wastewater treatment plant and rotating biological contactor treating sewage. Results of continuous operation showed that concentrations of DO, free ammonia (FA) and nitrite in the reactors played a key role in stimulating the anammox activity during start-up period. It is crucial to keep DO below 0.2 ppm, FA below 2 mg/L and nitrite nitrogen below 35 mg/L to cultivate anammox cells in the continuous bioreactor. When the levels of DO, FA and nitrite in the influent were controlled at less than the inhibition levels, the anammox activity increased gradually in the anaerobic condition. Addition of hydrogen sulphide into the reactor enhanced anammox activity in the continuous culture. Through the SEM, TEM and FISH analysis, anammox bacteria were detected in the granular sludge after 3 months of continuous operation.     

A study on UV-curable coatings for HD-DVD: Primer and top coats

This study relates to the development of coatings for optical discs in high-density digital versatile disc systems (HD-DVD or blue lay disk) that use a high numerical aperture of 0.85 at 405 nm wavelength and have a protective top layer over a primer layer for protection against damage and dust. Ultraviolet-curable raw materials of two acrylic monofunctional monomers ( isobornylacrylate, IBA and tetrahydrofurfurylacrylate, THFA) and two kinds of urethaneacrylate oligomers (OUMD and OUME) have been easily mixed with photoinitiators. Curing rate of these materials was characterized by FT-IR. In case of top coats, VTES (vinyltriethoxysilane) and acrylic acid were added to enhance the abrasion resistance. These two kinds of UV-curable resinous materials having no solvent were synthesized and investigated as means for making a blue ray disk having good optical and mechanical properties. In addition, dynamic characteristics including reflectivity, fluctuation of RF signal and noise level were also investigated.     

Describing metal surfaces and nanostructures with orbital-free density functional theory

Orbital-free density functional theory (OF-DFT) can be made to scale linearly with sample size, allowing thousands of atoms to be treated explicitly with quantum mechanics. State-of-the-art kinetic energy density functionals and ion–electron pseudopotentials are used to obtain accurate structural property predictions for nanoparticles, nanowires, extended surfaces, and nanoindentation of simple metals.     

Bibliometric analysis of tsunami research

The use of the bibilometric analytical technique for examining tsunami research does not exist in the literature. The objective of the study was to perform a bibliometric analysis of all tsunami-related publications in the Science Citation Index (SCI). Analyzed parameters included document type, language of publication, publication output, authorship, publication patterns, distribution of subject category, distribution of author keywords, country of publication, most-frequently cited article, and document distribution after the Indonesia tsunami. The US and Japan produced 53% of the total output where the seven major industrial countries accounted for the majority of the total production. English was the dominant language, comprising 95% of articles. A simulation model was applied to describe the relationship between the number of authors and the number of articles, the number of journals and the number of articles, and the percentage of total articles and the number of times a certain keyword was used. Moreover the tsunami publication patterns in the first 8 months after the Indonesia tsunami occurred on 26 December 2004 indicated a high percentage of non-article publications and more documents being published in journals with higher impact factors.     

An Area Optimization Method for Digital Filter Design

In this paper, we propose an efficient design method for area optimization in a digital filter. The conventional methods to reduce the number of adders in a filter have the problem of a long critical path delay caused by the deep logic depth of the filter due to adder sharing. Furthermore, there is such a disadvantage that they use the transposed direct form (TDF) filter which needs more registers than those of the direct form (DF) filter. In this paper, we present a hybrid structure of a TDF and DF based on the flattened coefficients method so that it can reduce the number of flip‐flops and full‐adders without additional critical path delay. We also propose a resource sharing method and sharing‐pattern searching algorithm to reduce the number of adders without deepening the logic depth. Simulation results show that the proposed structure can save the number of adders and registers by 22 and 26%, respectively, compared to the best one used in the past.     

Nickel- and copper-coated carbon fibre reinforced tin-lead alloy composites

Nickel and copper were deposited over brominated, surface treated, and pristine P-100 carbon fibres using cementation and electroplating techniques. The fibres were brominated by bromine vapour for 48 h and then desorbed at 200 °C in air for 12 h. The anodic oxidation treatment of the fibres involved electrochemical etching in a dilute sodium hydroxide electrolyte for 3 min. Electroplated coated fibres showed better tensile properties than cementation coated fibres. In addition, nickel coating exhibited better bonding with the carbon fibres compared to copper coating. The effect of bromination and surface treatment was improved adhesion between coating and fibres. Nickel- and copper-coated fibres, which were brominated, anodically oxidized, and pristine, reinforced tin-lead alloy composites were fabricated by squeeze casting. The composites containing coated treated carbon fibres had higher tensile and shear strength than the ones containing coated pristine carbon fibres. Moreover, the composite with coated brominated carbon fibres had better tensile strength and shear strength than the surface treatment. The results also showed the composites containing nickel-coated fibres had higher tensile and shear strength than the ones containing copper-coated fibres.