Bulk and Surface Properties of a VPO Catalyst Used in an Electrochemical Membrane Reactor: Conductivity-, XRD-, TPO- and XPS-study

In the first part of this work, the electrical conductivity of vanadium phosphorous oxide (VPO) catalyst was investigated by means of the 2-probe EIS method. The VPO showed an extremely low conductivity at low oxygen partial pressure, which is the prevailing condition in the anodic compartment in an electrochemical membrane reactor (EMR). In the second part of this study, fresh as well as VPO catalyst already used in an EMR were characterised with XRD, XPS and temperature programmed oxidation (TPO). The XRD measurements revealed an unchanged bulk phase structure after operation in the EMR. Significant differences in the average oxidation states of vanadium in the catalyst layer in the EMR were determined via XPS, where the catalyst surface facing the electrolyte membrane was more oxidised than the surface facing the anodic gas compartment. The lowered uptake and release of oxygen was observed in TPO experiments for the catalyst used in the EMR.     

Influence of the surface roughness on the properties of Au films measured by surface plasmon resonance and X-ray reflectometry

Thickness and refractive index of Au films thermally evaporated onto glass substrates and with an underlayer of Cr are determined from surface plasmon resonance. The results for the thickness are found to agree very well with those from X-ray reflectivity when a simple model of layers with flat interfaces is used. Plasmon propagation along thin films is influenced by radiative damping due to scattering from surface roughness. To study this influence the surface roughness of the glass substrate, Cr an Au layers are measured by X-ray reflectometry and the results used to introduce three intermediate layers with effective refractive indices and thicknesses corresponding to the roughness. Then Fresnel's equations are used to fit the reflectivity and to deduce the layer properties. It is found that the roughness affects to a great extent the optical parameters of the Au films even when it is smaller than 1 nm. In particular, the absolute value of real part of the dielectric constant decreases while its imaginary part increases when those effects are not taken into account.     

Robot control for robust stability with finite reachability time in the whole

A robot model incorporates possible discontinuous nonlinearities with unknown forms and values, unknown payload and unknown predictable external disturbance variations, all in known bounds. A control algorithm is synthesized to guarantee the following: 1.Robust global both stability and attraction with finite reachability time of an appropriately chosen sliding set. 2.The robot motions reach, on the sliding set, a desired motion in a prespecified finite time. 3. Robust both stability and global attraction with finite reachability time of the given robot desired motion. 4. A prespecified convergence quality of real motions to the desired motion, independently of the internal dynamics of the system and without oscillations, hence without chattering in the sliding mode. Robot control robustness means that the controller realizes the control without using information about the real robot internal dynamics. All this is achieved by using the Lyapunov method in a new way combined with a sliding mode approach, but without a variation of the controller structure. The theoretical results are applied to a rotational 3‐degree‐of‐freedom robot. The simulations well verify the robustness of the control algorithm and high quality of robot motions with a prespecified reachability time. ©1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

A comparative study of transformation functions for nonrigid image registration.

Transformation functions play a major role in nonrigid image registration. In this paper, the characteristics of thin-plate spline (TPS), multiquadric (MQ), piecewise linear (PL), and weighted mean (WM) transformations are explored and their performances in nonrigid image registration are compared. TPS and MQ are found to be most suitable when the set of control-point correspondences is not large (fewer than a thousand) and variation in spacing between the control points is not large. When spacing between the control points varies greatly, PL is found to produce a more accurate registration than TPS and MQ. When a very large set of control points is given and the control points contain positional inaccuracies, WM is preferred over TPS, MQ, and PL because it uses an averaging process that smoothes the noise and does not require the solution of a very large system of equations. Use of transformation functions in the detection of incorrect correspondences is also discussed.     

Kinetics and thermodynamics of water adsorption onto rice husks ash filled polypropene composites during soaking

The kinetics and thermodynamics of water adsorption onto rice husks ash filled polypropene composites during soaking were studied at different temperatures, quantities and nature of fillers. Raw rice husk, “white” and “black” rice husks ash and Aerosil were used as fillers of polypropene. The increase of fillers contents in the polymer matrix was found to result in non-linear increase of the amount of adsorbed water. The highest adsorption capacity showed the samples filled with raw rice husks, while the lowest—those filled with black rice husks ash. The adsorption kinetics was limited by intra-particle diffusion in plane sheet particles. The values of the diffusion coefficients D, diffusion constants D ^o, activation energy of the diffusion process Е _а, changes of free energy ΔG ^≠, enthalpy ΔH ^≠ and entropy ΔS ^≠ for the formation of the activated complex from the reagent were calculated. A compensation effect between D ^o and Е _а was observed. Based on the Van’t Hoff equation, the values of the changes of standard free energy ΔG ^o, enthalpy ΔH ^o and entropy ΔS ^o of water adsorption were calculated. The sorption process is exothermal in nature and accompanied with decrease of the entropy. The values of the sorption coefficient S and permeability coefficient P were calculated at 25 and 90 °C.     

Effect of grain size on the synthesis of active alumina from gibbsite by flash calcination and rehydration

Two series of alumina have been prepared by flash calcination (FCAL) and subsequent rehydration of coarse (> 50 m) and fine grain size gibbsite (< 50 m). The initial grain size of the gibbsite was found to determine the degree of amorphization, water content, rehydration ability, composition and pore structure of FCAL products. Active alumina materials having pore structure parameters similar to those of commercial alumina adsorbents and catalyst supports were obtained by FCAL and subsequent rehydration of fine grain size gibbsite.