Modeling study of migration-driven lateral instability in autocatalytic systems

The lateral stability of reaction fronts in simple autocatalytic models with the components carrying various charges is investigated when the system is exposed to an inhomogeneous electric field parallel to the direction of propagation. The enhanced migrational flux of the reactant destabilizes the planar front giving rise to a cellular structure because the electric field strength is greater on the reactant side of the reaction front. The onset of instability depends not only on the charge difference between the reactant and the autocatalyst but also on the variation of specific conductance in the course of the reaction, which results in a difference in electric field strength on the opposite sides of the reaction front.     

On the relationship between dependence tree classification error and Bayes error rate

Wong and Poon [1] showed that Chow and Liu's tree dependence approximation can be derived by minimizing an upper bound of the Bayes error rate. Wong and Poon's result was obtained by expanding the conditional entropy H(w|X). We derive the correct expansion of H(w|X) and present its implication.     

Mass housing

Professor Vir Handa's abiding interest in low‐cost housing for the lower‐income earners is demonstrated in his paper from the University of Waterloo, Ontario. He draws experience from time spent at the Building Research Institute, Roorkee, under the United Nations TOKTEN Programme and illustrates his paper with pictures from Trinidad, where he is an External Examiner at the University of the West Indies. He argues that although shelter communities are being built without any government help and without any awareness of any codes and standards, the job of the expert should be to determine new affordable code requirements.     

Enhanced hydrogen sorption in single walled carbon nanotube incorporated MIL-101 composite metal-organic framework

Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs) have emerged as potential hydrogen storage media due to their high surface area, pore volume and adjustable pore sizes. The large void space generated by cages in MOFs is not completely utilized for hydrogen storage application owing to weak interactions between the walls of MOFs and H₂ molecules. These unutilized volumes in MOFs can be effectively utilized by incorporation of other microporous materials such as single walled carbon nanotubes into the pores of MOFs which could effectively tune the pore size and pore volume of the material towards hydrogen sorption. Single walled carbon nanotubes (SWNT) incorporated MIL-101 composite MOF material (SWNT@MIL-101) was synthesized by adding purified single walled carbon nanotube (SWNT) in situ during the synthesis of MIL-101. The powder X-ray diffraction patterns of SWNT@MIL-101 showed the structure of MOF was not disturbed by SWNT incorporation. Hydrogen sorption capacities of MIL-101 was observed to increase from 6.37 to 9.18 wt% at 77 K up to 60 bar and from 0.23 to 0.64 wt% at 298 K up to 60 bar. The increment in the hydrogen uptake capacities of composite MOF materials was attributed to the decrease in the pore size and enhancement of micropore volume of MIL-101 by single walled carbon nanotube incorporation.     

Novel Trends to Revolutionize Preservation and Packaging of Fruits/Fruit Products: Microbiological and Nanotechnological Perspectives

Fruit preservation and packaging have been practiced since ages to maintain the constant supply of seasonal fruits over lengthened periods round the year. However, health and safety issues have attracted attention in recent decades. The safety and quality assurance of packaged fruits/fruit products are vital concerns in present day world-wide–integrated food supply chains. The growing demand of minimally or unprocessed packaged fruits has further aggravated the safety concerns which fuelled in extensive research with objectives to develop novel techniques of food processing, preservation, and packaging as well as for rapid, accurate, and early detection of contaminant products/microbes. Nevertheless, fruits and fruit-based products have yet to observe a panoramic introduction. Tropics and subtropics are the stellar producers of a variety of fruits; majority if not all is perishable and prone to postharvest decay. This evoked the opportunity to critically review the global scenario of emerging and novel techniques for fruit preservation and packaging, hence providing insight for their future implementation. This review would survey key nanotechnology innovations applied in preservation, packaging, safety, and storage of fruits and fruit-based products. The challenges and pros and cons of wider application of these innovative techniques, their commercial potential, and consumer acceptability have also been discussed.     

The effective velocity model: An improved approach to velocity sampling in actuator line models

Actuator line modeling of wind turbines requires the definition of a free-stream velocity in a computational mesh and a regularization kernel to project the computed body forces onto the domain. Both choices strongly influence the results. In this work, a novel velocity sampling method—the so-called effective velocity model (EVM)—is implemented in the CFD software SOWFA, validated, and compared to pre-existing approaches. Results show superior method robustness with respect to the regularization kernel width ( $ϵ$) choice while preserving acceptable accuracy. In particular, the power predicted by the EVM is nearly independent of the $ϵ$ value.     

Synthesis, structure, and in vitro antitumor activity of some glycoside derivatives of ferrocenyl-chalcones and ferrocenyl-pyrazolines

Some new glycosides of 3-ferrocenyl-1-(4'-hydroxyphenyl)-prop-2-en-1-one were prepared and transformed into the corresponding pyrazoline and pyrazole derivatives. Using methyl-hydrazine, formation of regioisomers was observed. DDQ was found to be a mild and efficient reagent for the pyrazoline-pyrazole dehydroaromatization process. The structure of the new compounds was proved by IR and NMR spectroscopy. The in vitro antitumor activity of the substances was investigated against human leukemia (HL-60) cells by the MTT method. Among these new compounds some chalcone derivatives (3 a, 3 b, 5 a, and 5 b) showed attractive in vitro antitumor effects on human leukemia cells. These molecules contained ferrocenyl moieties and a p-hydroxy-phenolic ring or a size-independent apolar substitution of that.     

A simple and efficient XFEM approach for 3-D cracks simulations

In this work, a simple and efficient XFEM approach has been presented to solve 3-D crack problems in linear elastic materials. In XFEM, displacement approximation is enriched by additional functions using the concept of partition of unity. In the proposed approach, a crack front is divided into a number of piecewise curve segments to avoid an iterative solution. A nearest point on the crack front from an arbitrary (Gauss) point is obtained for each crack segment. In crack front elements, the level set functions are approximated by higher order shape functions which assure the accurate modeling of the crack front. The values of stress intensity factors are obtained from XFEM solution by domain based interaction integral approach. Many benchmark crack problems are solved by the proposed XFEM approach. A convergence study has been conducted for few test problems. The results obtained by proposed XFEM approach are compared with the analytical/reference solutions.     

Volume estimation in dialysis patients: The concordance of brain‐type natriuretic peptide measurements and bioimpedance values

Correct estimation of the dialysis patients' hydration status remains an important clinical challenge. Bioimpedance measurements have been validated by various physiological tests, and the use of brain‐type natriuretic peptide (BNP) has been validated by inferior vena cava diameter measurements. This is an observational cohort study that evaluated the correspondence between bioimpedance‐measured overhydration percentage (OH%) and BNP. We measured predialysis OH% by bioimpedance apparatus (Body Composition Monitor) and BNP by microparticle enzyme‐linked immunoassay in 41 prevalent stable hemodialysis patients, 19 (46%) women, aged 58.9 ± 14.5 years. The cohort's average BNP was 2694 ± 3278 pg/mL and 10 (24.4%) of these 41 patients had BNP < 500 pg/mL (average 260.7 ± 108.5). The OH% was 8.5 ± 7.0% among those with a BNP < 500 pg/mL, while the rest of the population had an OH% of 21.4 ± 8.0%, corresponding to excess volumes of 1.6 ± 1.3 and 4.4 ± 3.8 L, respectively. The OH% vs. BNP relationship was best described by the exponential regression of y = 216.4e^0.097x, predicting a BNP of 216.4 pg/mL at 0% overhydration status (r 0.61). Receiver‐operating curves revealed an area under the curve of 0.885 for BNP when the OH% was set ≥15% of overhydration and an area under the curve of 0.918 for OH% when the BNP was set ≥500 pg/mL for being abnormal. We conclude that in our cohort there was a high degree of correspondence between these two tests with an exponential relationship between the measurements.