On the Characterisation of Silver Species for SCR of NO x with Ethanol

Reducing of nitrogen oxides (NO _x ) in a lean exhaust gases has become one of the most important environmental concerns. Among the different active phases studied for NO _x reduction reaction, silver-based catalysts supported over alumina show good performances using, as reducing agents, either hydrocarbons or oxygenated compounds. Nevertheless, a good understanding of the mechanism reaction has not been reached yet. This comprehension requires a better characterisation of the silver-based catalysts system. In our study, Ag/Al₂O₃ catalysts showed high efficiency in NO _x reduction using ethanol as reducing agent. The conversion plots, in steady state conditions for the different samples Ag/Al₂O₃ (0.8–3.5% Ag wt), show a great dependance of the activity with the metal loading. The optimal silver loading has been established around 2 wt.% Increasing the silver loading, the temperature of maximal NO _x conversion shifted toward the lower temperatures. According to the literature, a reduced and an oxide phase of silver have been observed by UV–Vis spectroscopy. The ratio between the two phases is changing with the silver loading. However, temperature programmed reduction (TPR) measurements reveal the presence of two types of oxide phases. TPR reveal the coexistence of a silver oxide phase (Ag₂O), according to a production of water in the course of the reaction, and a non-oxygenated phase attributed to isolated Ag⁺ cation. Thus, an original way using TPR measurements has been developed to differentiate the various oxidized phases. The aim of this characterisation is to correlate the catalyst’s activity with the observed silver phases, in order to understand the nature of phase active for NO _x reduction at low temperatures.     

Di-n-Butyl-, Tri-n-Butyl- and Triphenyltin dl-Terebates: Synthesis, Characterization and In Vitro Antitumour Activity

Di-n-butyltin, tri-n-butyltin and triphenyltin terebates were screened against several human tumour cell lines and found comparably or more active than carboplatin, cis-platin, 5-fluorouracil, methotrexate and doxorubicin, some reference compounds used clinically.     

Microbiota-Derived Extracellular Vesicles Detected in Human Blood from Healthy Donors

The microbiota constitutes an important part of the holobiont in which extracellular vesicles (EVs) are key players in health, especially regarding inter- and intra-kingdom communications. Analysis of EVs from the red blood cell concentrates of healthy donors revealed variable amounts of OmpA and LPS in 12 of the 14 analyzed samples, providing indirect experimental evidence of the presence of microbiota EVs in human circulating blood in the absence of barrier disruption. To investigate the role of these microbiota EVs, we tracked the fusion of fluorescent Escherichia coli EVs with blood mononuclear cells and showed that, in the circulating blood, these EVs interacted almost exclusively with monocytes. This study demonstrates that bacterial EVs constitute critical elements of the host–microbiota cellular communication. The analysis of bacterial EVs should thus be systematically included in any characterization of human EVs.     

Frequency identification of Hammerstein-Wiener systems with backlash input nonlinearity

International Journal of Control, Automation and Systems - The problem of system identification is addressed for Hammerstein-Wiener systems that involve memory operator of backlash type bordered by...     

Characterization of fractionated phenolic resins used in photoresists

Novolak resins fractionated using a liquid/liquid centrifugal fractionation/separation technique were characterized and contrasted to resins fractionated by conventional methods. The new fractionation method resulted in higher yields of resins with comparable or improved functional properties when used in i‐line sensitive (365 nm) photoresist formulations. By characterizing the isolateld resin and the lower molecular weight (Mw) fractions removed during fractionation, a better understanding of the structural differences associated with the fractionation processes could be determined. The potential for improving the fractionation/separation process and for obtaining higher yields and more consistent resists with the resins was identified.     

Toxicity profiles in vivo in mice and antitumour activity in tumour-bearing mice of di- and triorganotin compounds

The in vivo toxicity profiles in mice and the antitumour activity in tumour bearing mice were screened for four di-n-butyltin and five triorganotin carboxylates, di-n-butyltin diterebate (5), bis(phenylacetate) (6), bis(deoxycholate) (7), bis(lithocholate) (8), tri-n-butyltin terebate (9), cinnamate (10), and triphenyltin terebate (11).At their maximum tolerated dosis (MTD), no antitumour effect (T/C ~1) was observed for the compounds 5, 7, 9, 10 and 11. The compounds 6 (T/C = 0.51) and 8 (T/C = 0.42) showed clear antitumour activity after single dose administration and might therefore be of interest for further antitumour activity studies.     

State and Unknown Input H∞ Observers for Discrete‐Time LPV Systems

This paper proposes state and unknown input (UI) observers for linear parameter varying (LPV) systems affected by UI and perturbations in both state and measurement equations. The estimation is done by minimizing the L₂ transfer between the perturbations and the state estimation error (H_∞‐observation). The originality of the paper is to provide a generalization of existing works, specially by relaxing an assumption on systems matrices, widely used for UI decoupling. After giving the main results, some examples illustrate the theoretical contributions and give comparisons to former publications.     

Parameter identification of Hammerstein systems containing backlash operators with arbitrary-shape parametric borders

A two-stage parameter identification method is developed for Hammerstein systems containing backlash nonlinearities bordered by parametric arbitrary-shape lines. In the first stage, a persistently exciting input is designed so that the linear subsystem can be made decoupled from the nonlinear element. Therefore, linear subsystem identification is coped with using a least squares estimator enjoying consistency, due to input persistent excitation. Then, the backlash parameters are estimated using appropriate periodic exciting signals and consistent parameter estimators.     

Sensor fault tolerant control of nonlinear Takagi–Sugeno systems. Application to vehicle lateral dynamics

This paper presents a new scheme for sensor fault tolerant control for nonlinear systems based on the Takagi–Sugeno modeling. First, a structured residual generator aimed at detecting and isolating sensor faults is designed. A bank of observers controlled either by only one system output or a set of outputs is then implemented, leading to a set of state estimates. The parallel distributed compensation structure is adopted to design the fault tolerant controller. The novelty in this paper is that the estimated state used in the controller is a weighted state vector obtained from all the estimated states provided by the different observers. The weighting functions depend on the residual vector signals delivered by the residual generator. They are designed to avoid crisp switches in the control law. Indeed, the interesting feature of the proposed approach is to avoid the commonly used switching strategy. For each residual component, the greater its magnitude is, the less the weight affected to the corresponding state estimate is. Consequently, the controller only uses estimations computed on the basis of healthy measurements. The closed‐loop stability is studied with the Lyapunov theory, and the obtained conditions are expressed as a set of linear matrix inequalities. The proposed residual generation and fault tolerant controller are applied to a vehicle lateral dynamics affected by sensor faults. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.