Towards Diastereomeric Pure Salts with Antisolvent Methods

Chiral molecules, especially enantiomers and diastereomers of purity > 99 %, present a significant market share within the chemical, pharmaceutical, and flavor industries. Antisolvent precipitations, both batch and semicontinuous operations to serve the current trends in flow chemistry were demonstrated to be environmentally benign and efficient tools in achieving high optical purities. Although salts are known to be insoluble in supercritical CO₂, instabilities of the nascent salts were detected and applied for increasing efficiency. Diastereomeric excess values of the crystalline products exceeded 99 % in maximum of three consecutive steps both by repeated resolution with half molar equivalent of the amine to the acid and by direct recrystallization of the salts.     

Thermal Monitoring of Self-Checking Systems

With the increasing power density in integrated systems resulting from scaling down, the occurrence of field failures due to overheating has considerably increased. Faulty operation can be prevented by on-line temperature monitoring. This paper deals with questions of on-line temperature monitoring in safety-critical systems. First the possible temperature sensors are reviewed and basic principles of self-checking systems including such sensors are detailed, then a new temperature sensor cell with extremely good parameters designed especially for DfTT applications is presented. The basic questions of integrating thermal sensors into self-checking systems are also discussed.     

Determinants of early and late results of combined valve operations and coronary artery bypass grafting

BACKGROUND: Factors determining the outcome of operative correction of valvular abnormalities combined with coronary artery bypass grafting are still incompletely defined. METHODS: Determinants of early and late (more than 90 days) deaths and event-free survival were studied for combined valve operations and coronary artery bypass grafting in 741 patients using multivariate analysis. RESULTS: Ninety-day survival probability was 89% (95% confidence interval, 87% to 92%). Preoperative risk factors for early death were age, female sex, renal failure, New York Heart Association class IV or V, and mitral insufficiency. The operative risk factor was the duration of aortic cross-clamping. Five- and 10-year survival probabilities were 74% (95% confidence interval, 71% to 78%) and 43% (95% confidence interval, 36% to 50%), respectively. Preoperative risk factors for late death were age, preoperative renal failure, New York Heart Association class IV or V, vessel disease, and nonsinus rhythm. Five- and 10-year event-free survival probabilities were 57% (95% confidence interval, 53% to 61%) and 23% (95% confidence interval, 17% to 28%), respectively. Preoperative risk factors for non-event-free survival were age, female sex, reduced left ventricular function, mitral regurgitation, and pacemaker rhythm. CONCLUSION: The demographic factors of age and female sex; the comorbid condition of renal failure; the cardiac conditions of advanced New York Heart Association class, left ventricular function, mitral regurgitation, vessel disease, and cardiac rhythm; and the operative condition of ischemia time are the most important predictors of clinical outcome after combined valve operations and coronary artery bypass grafting.     

Correction to: “SPOCU”: scaled polynomial constant unit activation function

Neural Computing and Applications - Addendum on SPOCU fitting and Erratum.     

Case Depth Measurement of Induction Hardening Using Image Processing

INDUCTION HARDENING of medium carbon steel iswidely used to produce automotive parts,agriculturalequipment and other machines.Inductor with highfrequency electric current was used as a heater totransform microstructure of steel surface into Austenite.Then water was sprayed on the heated steel.Austenitetransformed into Martensite.Area of microstructuralchange was considered to be case depth that was animportant parameter to be controlled in productionprocess.The standard procedure to de…     

Study of rotational mobility of stable nitroxide radicals in solid polymers

The rotational mobility of stable nitroxide radicals in PS, PMMA, PVC, PP and PE has been studied over a wide temperature range by the e.s.r. method. At temperatures T lower than T_g, spin probes act as kinetically independent particles, the rotational frequency of which is deter mined mainly by the micropore dimensions of the polymer and depends indirectly on the mobility of segments or side groups.     

Simulating protection rackets: a case study of the Sicilian Mafia

Protection racketeering groups are powerful, deeply entrenched in multiple societies across the globe, and they harm the societies and economies in which they operate in multiple ways. These reasons make their dynamics important to understand and an objective of both scientific and application-oriented interest. Legal and social norm-based approaches arguably play significant roles in influencing protection racket dynamics. We propose an agent-based simulation model, the Palermo Scenario, to enrich our understanding of these influences and to test the effect of different policies on protection racket dynamics. Our model integrates the legal and the social norm-based approaches and uses a complex normative agent architecture that enables the analysis of both agents’ behaviours and mental normative representations driving behaviour. We demonstrate the usefulness of the model and the benefits of using this complex normative architecture through a case study of the Sicilian Mafia.     

Drawings of graphs on surfaces with few crossings

We give drawings of a complete graphK _n withO(n ⁴ log² g/g) many crossings on an orientable or nonorientable surface of genusg 2. We use these drawings ofK _n and give a polynomial-time algorithm for drawing any graph withn vertices andm edges withO(m ² log² g/g) many crossings on an orientable or nonorientable surface of genusg 2. Moreover, we derive lower bounds on the crossing number of any graph on a surface of genusg 0. The number of crossings in the drawings produced by our algorithm are within a multiplicative factor ofO(log² g) from the lower bound (and hence from the optimal) for any graph withm 8n andn ²/m g m/64.The research of the third and the fourth authors was partially supported by Grant No. 2/1138/94 of the Slovak Academy of Sciences and by EC Cooperative action IC1000 Algorithms for Future Technologies (Project ALTEC). A preliminary version of this paper was presented at WG93 and published in Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 790, 1993, pp. 388–396.     

Aerodynamic optimization via multi-objective micro-genetic algorithm with range adaptation,knowledge-based reinitialization,crowding and ε-dominance

In this study, an optimization of the airfoil of a sailplane is carried out by a recently developed multi-objective genetic algorithm based on microevolution, containing crowding, range adaptation, knowledge-based reinitialization and ε-dominance. Its efficiency was tested on a set of test problems. The results are encouraging, suggesting that very small populations can be used effectively to solve real-world multi-objective optimization problems in many cases of interest.