Meß- und Regeltechnik in Chemieanlagen unter sicherheitstechnischen Aspekten

Safety aspects of control engineering. The influence of control engineering on the safety of chemical plant is described. Particular attention is paid to demands placed on control engineering equipment from a safety viewpoint and to their adjustment, arrangement, and link-up. It is shown that, under certain circumstances, control engineering equipment can be used instead of conventional safety equipment, while preserving the same degree of safety. Considerations are also presented as to effective testing procedures and reasonable testing intervals. These ideas are preceded by some fundamental safety concepts relating to the planning of chemical plant.     

Terpolymers. II. Mechanical properties and transition temperatures of terpolymers of vinyl stearate,vinyl acetate,and vinyl chloride

Vinyl stearate was studied as a major internal plasticizer in terpolymers containing vinyl acetate and vinyl chloride. The terpolymers were prepared by systematically replacing vinyl acetate by close increments of vinyl stearate starting with combinations of vinyl acetate and vinyl chloride, in increments, over all compositions. For comparison of properties, a complete range of copolymers of vinyl stearate and vinyl chloride, as well as mixtures of poly(vinyl chloride) and di-2-ethylhexyl phthalate (DOP) were also made. The external plasticizer was more efficient in reducing the glass temperature than was vinyl stearate. The decline in T_g with weight fraction of plasticizer was linear for the copolymers and terpolymers but concave downward with the liquid diluent. The linear decline was shown to involve mere additivity of the free volume contributed by each side-chain methylene (or methyl) group in both vinyl esters to reducing T_g. The mechanism of the diluent system was more complex. However, the magnitude of the reduction of tensile modulus at a given weight fraction of DOP could be equaled or exceeded by the same amount of vinyl stearate, by increasing the vinyl acetate content of the base copolymer to 40 mole-% or more. Unfortunately, the ultimate strengths and elongations of internally plasticized systems were reduced more than those of the mixtures at comparable compositions. Vinyl stearate was found to markedly retard photolytic degradation compared to both vinyl acetate and the external plasticizer in unstabilized samples having nearly the same thermal treatment. The effect was greater than could be ascribed to dilution by the long alkyl group. The production of a stearoyl radical more stable than the radicals initiating dehydrochlorination is suggested as a possible mechanism.     

Mechanical properties and transition temperatures of copolymers of N-n-alkylacrylamides and vinylidene chloride

Mechanical and solution properties, melting transitions, torsional stiffness temperatures, T_f, and selected modulus-temperature curves are presented for copolymers of the N-n-alkylacrylamides with vinylidene chloride. Copolymers were prepared at 60°C across the range of compositions, using as comonomers N-n-butyl-, octyl-, dodecyl- and oleyl-acrylamide, which have amorphous side-chains, and N-n-octadecyl acrylamide and n-octadecyl acrylate whose side-chains are crystalline. The mechanical properties reflected the effect of the decline in backbone crystallinity and the simultaneous development of strong intermolecular interactions in the amorphous stage. Copolymers were stiff or showed brittle failure across the compositional range except when intermolecular forces were reduced (with n-octadrcyl acrylate) and side-chain crystallization eliminated (with N-oleylacrylamide). These systems and the n-dodecylacrylamide copolymers had yield strengths less than brittle strengths and substantial elongations. Backbone crystallinity was eliminated at about 15 mole % amide and side-chain crystallinity vanished at less than 10 mole % of the amide in the N-n-octadecylacrylamide series. No depression in side-chain melting point occurred with dilution by segments of vinylidene chloride. Over-all decline in the flex-temperature was the normal monotonic function of composition except that values increased in magnitude at high vinylidene chloride contents, the effect presumably being caused by the presence of crystallinity. An empirical equation was developed which permitted the calculation of T_f for any N-n-alkylacrylamide composition with any number of carbon atoms in the side-chain, above 3.     

Viscosity index. I. Evaluation of selected copolymers incorporating n-octadecyl acrylate as viscosity index improvers

Compositionally and structurally varied copolymers all containing n-octadecyl acrylate were prepared and evaluated as viscosity index improvers in a common base oil under conditions of low shear. Systems evaluated over a range of copolymer and blend composition were: copolymers of n-octadecyl acrylate with, respectively, methyl methacrylate, 2-ethylhexyl acrylate, and n-dodecyl acrylate; and homopolymers of poly(n-octadecyl acrylate), prepared with a wide range of molecular weights. Properties were compared with those of blends of commercial methacrylate copolymers (acryloids) which had been freed of their entraining liquid. Mixtures of base oil with copolymers of n-octadecyl acrylate and methyl methacrylate, compared at fixed SAE viscosities, were the most efficient of all blends studied. They had the smallest rate of change of viscosity with temperature (as measured by their ASTM slopes), particularly in the composition region of incipient polymer precipitation at room temperature. Efficiency of certain of these composition was somewhat greater than that of the acryloids. A parameter that related concentration and weight-average molecular weight was used to correlate all of the data for ASTM slope and viscosity. Empirical relations developed by using this parameter enabled rheological data to be estimated that agree within 6% of experimental values for the case of thermodynamically good base oil solvents. These data demonstrated the relatively small contributions of copolymer structure to viscosity index improvement.     

Growth and the microstructural and ferroelectric characterization of oriented BaMgF(4) thin films

The growth of ferroelectric BaMgF(4) thin films on Si(100), sapphire, and other substrates under ultrahigh vacuum (UHV) conditions is reported. Microstructural characterization of the films using transmission electron microscopy (TEM) revealed that they were oriented crystalline films, although not epitaxial. Ferroelectric hysteresis measurements yielded spontaneous polarization and coercivity values of almost 1.0 muC/cm(2) and 160 kV/cm, respectively. The discrepancy with the bulk ferroelectric values were attributed to the electrical contacts, impurities in the film, and lack of polar axis orientation. Preliminary capacitance-voltage (C-V) hysteresis measurements on a 480-nm-thick BaMgF(4) film yielded a 10.8-V threshold shift (memory window) in response to a +/-10-V programming voltage for a MIS gate structure similar to that of the ferroelectric memory field-effect transistor (FEMFET).     

The Battle Over E-commerce Sales Taxes Heats Up

The inability of states to collect sales taxes from online vendors is a salient issue during the current economic decline. Further, brick and mortar retailers, who must charge customers sales tax, have pushed for legislation requiring online vendors to also do so. States have enacted legislation requiring online vendors, such as Amazon.com LLC, to collect and pay these taxes. In this article the authors describe the issue and make recommendations for resolution.     

A greedy gradient-simulated annealing selection hyper-heuristic

Educational timetabling problem is a challenging real world problem which has been of interest to many researchers and practitioners. There are many variants of this problem which mainly require scheduling of events and resources under various constraints. In this study, a curriculum based course timetabling problem at Yeditepe University is described and an iterative selection hyper-heuristic is presented as a solution method. A selection hyper-heuristic as a high level methodology operates on the space formed by a fixed set of low level heuristics which operate directly on the space of solutions. The move acceptance and heuristic selection methods are the main components of a selection hyper-heuristic. The proposed hyper-heuristic in this study combines a simulated annealing move acceptance method with a learning heuristic selection method and manages a set of low level constraint oriented heuristics. A key goal in hyper-heuristic research is to build low cost methods which are general and can be reused on unseen problem instances as well as other problem domains desirably with no additional human expert intervention. Hence, the proposed method is additionally applied to a high school timetabling problem, as well as six other problem domains from a hyper-heuristic benchmark to test its level of generality. The empirical results show that our easy-to-implement hyper-heuristic is effective in solving the Yeditepe course timetabling problem. Moreover, being sufficiently general, it delivers a reasonable performance across different problem domains.     

Learning market prices in real-time supply chain management

This paper proposes a model for dynamic pricing that combines knowledge of production capacity and existing commitments, reasoning about uncertainty and learning of market conditions in an attempt to optimise expected profits. In particular, the market conditions are represented as a set of probabilities over the success rate of product prices, and those prices are learned online as the market develops. The dynamic pricing model is integrated into a real-time supply chain management agent using the Trading Agent Competition Supply Chain Management game as a test framework. We evaluate the agent experimentally in competition with other supply chain agents, and demonstrate the benefits of incorporating more market data into the dynamic pricing mechanism.     

Verification of evolving software via component substitutability analysis

This paper presents an automated and compositional procedure to solve the substitutability problem in the context of evolving software systems. Our solution contributes two techniques for checking correctness of software upgrades: (1) a technique based on simultaneous use of over-and under-approximations obtained via existential and universal abstractions; (2) a dynamic assume-guarantee reasoning algorithm—previously generated component assumptions are reused and altered on-the-fly to prove or disprove the global safety properties on the updated system. When upgrades are found to be non-substitutable, our solution generates constructive feedback to developers showing how to improve the components. The substitutability approach has been implemented and validated in the ComFoRT reasoning framework, and we report encouraging results on an industrial benchmark. This is an extended version of a paper, Dynamic Component Substitutability Analysis, published in the Proceedings of the Formal Methods 2005 Conference, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 3582, by the same authors. This research was sponsored by the National Science Foundation under grant nos. CNS-0411152, CCF-0429120, CCR-0121547, and CCR-0098072, the Semiconductor Research Corporation under grant no. TJ-1366, the US Army Research Office under grant no. DAAD19-01-1-0485, the Office of Naval Research under grant no. N00014-01-1-0796, the ICAST project and the Predictable Assembly from Certifiable Components (PACC) initiative at the Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of any sponsoring institution, the US government or any other entity.