THE ADHESION OF ISOCYANATE-BASED POLYMERS TO STEEL

Isocyanate-based materials have been used for decades as the basis for high performance adhesives, coatings, and primers. The origin of the excellent adhesion of these materials to metals such as steel has been generally assumed to derive from the condensation of isocyanates with metal hydroxyls to form metal oxide-cyanate esters analogous to urethanes. In this work Fourier transform infrared reflection (FTIR) was used to demonstrate that these esters do indeed form, but that the esterification is preceded by the formation of carbamate salts between the isocyanate and the hydrated metal oxide.

Isocyanate pMDI Polyurethane Steel Adhesion Interface     

Effects of allelochemicals on plant respiration and oxygen isotope fractionation by the alternative oxidase

The goal of this investigation was to determine the effects of allelochemicals on plant respiration that thereby may be responsible for their role in growth inhibition. We have tested the effects of juglone, quercetin, cinnamic acid, and-pinene on respiration rates, and electron partitioning through the cytochrome and alternative respiratory pathways, by measuring on-line oxygen consumption and oxygen isotope fractionation in soybean cotyledon tissue. Cinnamic acid and-pinene decreased the oxygen consumption rate and increased the relative partitioning of electron transport to the alternative pathway. Possible biochemical mechanisms of these effects are discussed.     

BLOOD VISCOELASTICITY FOR CONDITIONS OF PHYSIOLOGICAL FLOW IN SMALL ARTERIES

The viscoelasticity of blood is quantified by studying the oscillatory flow of suspensions of RBC in plasma in 218 μm and 400 μm glass capillary tubes. The flow conditions are chosen to reflect normal physiological flow in small arterial vessels. Data are obtained for suspension hematocrits between 35 and 80 percent, and at physiological temperature (37°C) The results indicate that the elastic component of the viscoelasticity of blood is effectively negligible for the conditions of this study; the measured pressure gradient-flowrate relationship is dominated by the viscous component of blood viscoelasticity.     

Parallelised production of fine and calibrated emulsions by coupling flow-focusing technique and partial wetting phenomenon

The capacity of microfluidic technology to fabricate monodisperse emulsion droplets is well established. Parallelisation of droplet production is a prerequisite for using such an approach for making high-quality materials for either fundamental or industrial applications where product quantity matters. Here, we investigate the emulsification efficiency of parallelised drop generators based on a flow-focusing geometry when incorporating the role of partial wetting in order to make emulsion droplets with a diameter below 10 μm. Confinement intrinsically encountered in microsystems intensifies the role played by interfaces between liquids and solids. We thus take advantage of partial wetting to enhance the maximum confinement accessible due to liquid flow focusing. We compare the performances brought by partial wetting to more established routes such as step emulsification. We show that the step configuration and the partial wetting regime are both well suited for being parallelised and thus open the way to the production of fine and calibrated emulsions for further applications. Finally, this new route of emulsification that exploits partial wetting between the fluids and the channel walls opens possibilities to the formation of substantially smaller droplets, as required in many fields of application.     

Economical and Efficient Fading Lamps*

Tests have been made with over 300 dyed or pigmented materials exposed to mercury-tungsten or mercury lamps. The colorations were of a wide range of hue and light-fastness properties (1 to 8 and above) and in several depths on different substrates. The mercury-tungsten fluorescent lamp (500 W) gave results identical with those obtained with daylight or xenon arclight for 75% of the very varied selection of 174 patterns examined, and 25 % were within one-half of a grade, except for five which differed by one grade. When the blue standards are faded in this lamp (at 45% r.h.), they have an average interval factor of about 2.1. The required times of exposure are similar to those for the xenon arclight. The equipment required is extremely simple, and its initial and operating costs are considerably lower than those of methods hitherto used for testing in artificial light. The equipment can readily be used on the laboratory bench and is suitable for routine testing of the light fastness of any coloured material. In addition to the control of humidity, temperature control is possible, though this is not usually necessary. The mercury-vapour lamp (400 W) has also been similarly examined, using 138 patterns. It is not recommended for general use but is valuable for routine sorting tests of materials of very high fastness (BS grading above 7). The blue standard patterns fade, under exposure to these lamps, in the same sequence and with similar interval spacings, as in daylight or xenon light.     

Automated analysis of images in documents for intelligent document search

Authors use images to present a wide variety of important information in documents. For example, two-dimensional (2-D) plots display important data in scientific publications. Often, end-users seek to extract this data and convert it into a machine-processible form so that the data can be analyzed automatically or compared with other existing data. Existing document data extraction tools are semi-automatic and require users to provide metadata and interactively extract the data. In this paper, we describe a system that extracts data from documents fully automatically, completely eliminating the need for human intervention. The system uses a supervised learning-based algorithm to classify figures in digital documents into five classes: photographs, 2-D plots, 3-D plots, diagrams, and others. Then, an integrated algorithm is used to extract numerical data from data points and lines in the 2-D plot images along with the axes and their labels, the data symbols in the figure’s legend and their associated labels. We demonstrate that the proposed system and its component algorithms are effective via an empirical evaluation. Our data extraction system has the potential to be a vital component in high volume digital libraries.     

Multilevel Monte Carlo methods and applications to elliptic PDEs with random coefficients

We consider the numerical solution of elliptic partial differential equations with random coefficients. Such problems arise, for example, in uncertainty quantification for groundwater flow. We describe a novel variance reduction technique for the standard Monte Carlo method, called the multilevel Monte Carlo method, and demonstrate numerically its superiority. The asymptotic cost of solving the stochastic problem with the multilevel method is always significantly lower than that of the standard method and grows only proportionally to the cost of solving the deterministic problem in certain circumstances. Numerical calculations demonstrating the effectiveness of the method for one- and two-dimensional model problems arising in groundwater flow are presented.     

Semi-automated feature-tracking of East Antarctic sea ice from Envisat ASAR imagery

While feature tracking of sea ice using cross-correlation methods on pairs of satellite Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images has been extensively carried out in the Arctic, this is not the case in the Antarctic. This is due to the dynamic nature of Antarctic pack ice, its microwave signature, the tendency for SAR swath paths to be poorly aligned with the often narrow sea ice zone around the continent and inadequate satellite sampling. A semi-automated system, known as IPADS (IMCORR [IMageCORRelation] Processing, Analysis and Display System), has been developed to map fast ice and pack ice in Antarctica using multiple pairs of SAR images. The software processing pipeline uses overlapping image pairs which are geocoded and roughly registered using only data contained in the image headers. Next, fast ice maps are rapidly generated using zero motion features located within ocean regions. This also provides precise image registration. Finally, the same image pairs are re-examined for pack ice motion in a slower off-line batch process. The pack and fast ice are identified using a cluster-based search method which compares both location and motion information. Each image pair generates a NetCDF file which adds to a growing database of Antarctic sea ice motion and ice roughness. Five image-pair examples are presented to illustrate the methods used as well as their strengths and limitations. Substantial pack ice motion can often be detected in the marginal ice zone on SAR images only a few days apart.