Properties of physisorbed water layers on gold revealed in a FEM study

Field emission study of thin water layers was performed to examine their properties and their changes after application of a high electric field. Comparison of field emission characteristics of water layers adsorbed on clean tungsten and gold-covered tungsten suggested that, whereas water molecules adsorbed on tungsten are oriented by oxygen atoms towards the metal surface, water layer on gold-covered tungsten has amorphous character with no preferential orientation. Both heated and non-heated layers are heavily influenced by applied high electric field strengths (F ≈30 MV/cm). Decrease of the work function and of the voltage needed for a constant emission current during successive increase of the electric field was tentatively interpreted in terms of chemical and morfological changes of the water layer due to the field dissociation and solvation.     

Numerical simulations of a filament in a flowing soap film

Experiments concerning the properties of soap films have recently been carried out and these systems have been proposed as experimental versions of theoretical two‐dimensional liquids. A silk filament introduced into a flowing soap film, was seen to demonstrate various stable modes, and these were, namely, a mode in which the filament oscillates and one in which the filament is stationary and aligns with the flow of the liquid. The system could be forced from the oscillatory mode into the non‐ oscillatory mode by varying the length of the filament. In this article we use numerical and computational techniques in order to simulate the strongly coupled behaviour of the filament and the fluid. Preliminary results are presented for the specific case in which the filament is seen to oscillate continuously for the duration of our simulation. We also find that the filament oscillations are strongly suppressed when we reduce the effective length of the filament. We believe that these results are reminiscent of the different oscillatory and non‐oscillatory modes observed in experiment. The numerical solutions show that, in contrast to experiment, vortices are created at the leading edge of the filament and are preferentially grown in the curvature of the filament and are eventually released from the trailing edge of the filament. In a similar manner to oscillating hydrofoils, it seems that the oscillating filaments are in a minimal energy state, extracting sufficient energy from the fluid to oscillate. In comparing numerical and experimental results it is possible that the soap film does have an effect on the fluid flow especially in the boundary layer where surface tension forces are large. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Control of the Morphology of Organic-Inorganic Hybrid Materials Elaborated by Reactive Processing Without Solvent

We study the synthesis of organic-inorganic hybrids in the molten state of the polymer without solvent, by reactive processing. The synthesis is based in a first step upon the crosslinking of ethylene vinyl acetate copolymer (EVA) through an exchange reaction between the pendant ester groups of EVA and tetrapropoxysilane (TPOS) in presence of dibutyltin oxide (DBTO) as an indispensable catalyst. Then in a second step the hydrolysis-condensation reactions of residual alkoxide groups results in silica network formation, which is covalently bonded with the organic network. An original approach was developed to correlate the evolution of the hydrolysis-condensation reactions through the assessment of propanol by gas chromatography and the evolution of the morphology through SAXS and TEM analysis. Silica-rich domains with a diameter close to 5 nm are obtained.     

Recent advances in the analysis of steroid hormones and related drugs.

The development during the last 15 years and the state-of-the-art in the analysis of bulk steroid hormone drugs and hormone-like structures and pharmaceutical formulations made thereof are summarized. Other steroids (sterols, bile acids, cardiac glycosides, vitamins D) as well as biological-clinical aspects and pharmacokinetic and metabolic studies are excluded from this review. The state-of-the-art is summarized based on comparisons of monographs in the latest editions of the European Pharmacopoeia, United States Pharmacopoeia and the Japanese Pharmacopoeia. This is followed by sections dealing with new developments in the methodology for the fields of spectroscopic and spectrophotometric, chromatographic, electrophoretic and hyphenated techniques as well electroanalytical methods. The review is terminated by two problem-oriented sections: examples on impurity and degradation profiling as well as enantiomeric analysis.     

Electrochemical reduction of 1-([(4-halophenyl)imino]methyl)-2-naphthols in aprotic media.

The electrochemical reduction of 1-([(4-halophenyl)imino]methyl)-2-naphthols on graphite electrodes was studied using cyclic voltammetry, chronoamperometry, constant-potential coulometry and preparative constant-potential electrolysis techniques. The data revealed that the reduction on graphite was irreversible and followed an EC mechanism. The diffusion coefficients and the number of electrons transferred were determined using the chronoamperometric Cottrell slope and the ultramicro disc Pt-electrode steady-state current. The number of electrons was also determined by bulk electrolysis. The compounds were subjected to constant-potential preparative electrolysis and the electrolysis products were purified and identified by spectroscopic methods. Based on these findings, a mechanism for the electro-reduction process is proposed.     

Synthesis of Novel Monomeric Dyes with Anthraquinone Residue

Two novel polymerizable dyes with anthraquinone residue have been prepared, and their structures were characterized by FTIR, ^1HNMR and EA.     

Augmented Lagrangian Algorithms Based on the Spectral Projected Gradient Method for Solving Nonlinear Programming Problems

The spectral projected gradient method SPG is an algorithm for large-scale bound-constrained optimization introduced recently by Birgin, Martínez, and Raydan. It is based on the Raydan unconstrained generalization of the Barzilai-Borwein method for quadratics. The SPG algorithm turned out to be surprisingly effective for solving many large-scale minimization problems with box constraints. Therefore, it is natural to test its perfomance for solving the sub-problems that appear in nonlinear programming methods based on augmented Lagrangians. In this work, augmented Lagrangian methods which use SPG as the underlying convex-constraint solver are introduced (ALSPG) and the methods are tested in two sets of problems. First, a meaningful subset of large-scale nonlinearly constrained problems of the CUTE collection is solved and compared with the perfomance of LANCELOT. Second, a family of location problems in the minimax formulation is solved against the package FFSQP.