Feasibility study for the preparation of certified reference materials part I – mineral oil contaminated soils

The international joint project HYCREF (Contract No. G6RD-CT-2002-00854), funded by the European Commission in the 5th Framework programme, aimed to develop methods to prepare homogeneous and stable reference materials of water, soil, and waste contaminated with mineral oil hydrocarbons and to certify the mineral oil content by gas chromatographic methods. The results of a feasibility study for the preparation of three soil reference materials are discussed in this paper, and for the preparation of three waste reference materials in the second part (Koch et al., Accred Qual Assur submitted for publication). The soil materials were selected to represent different soil types and contamination levels. The project plan set three requirements for these reference materials: uncertainty in the mineral oil content resulting from the certification exercise <5%, a sample inhomogeneity of <3% and a minimum long-term stability of 5 years. For the most part, these requirements were met within this project.     

Maximum entropy deconvolution of AFM and STM images

The Maximum Entropy Method (MEM) has been applied successfully to the deconvolution of images obtained by Atomic Force (AFM) and Scanning Tunneling Microscopy (STM) using a NanoScope III system. The images have been taken on graphite (STM) and NaCl (AFM) substrates. Image processing has been performed running the Cambridge MaxEnt Fortran 77 library MEMSYS-5 on an IBM RISC 6000/360. Among the possible hypotheses the optimal solution was selected using the standard entropy method. ICF and response function have been generated artificially to fit the correlation of physical structures for atomically resolved images. Comparison of MEM and FFT revealed, that the main advantage of MEM is its ability to reproduce atomic defects on regular structures, whereas FFT deconvolution tends to eliminate these perturbations.     

Stability analysis of gravity driven shear flows with free surface for power-law fluids

Summary We study the stability of thin films of fluids subject to gravity along inclined planes, obeying a power-law constitutive relation of the Ostwald-de Waele type. A first analysis, in which the inertia terms are ignored, shows such flow to be stable against small, linear perturbations; a second analysis, in which the inertia terms are included, proves that there are stable and unstable regimes that are separated by a critical Ostwald-de Waele number O. Numerical computations for selected values of O demonstrate the decay and growth rate behavior of some finite amplitude disturbances. Received 12 May 1997; accepted for publication 23 July 1997     

Extracting elements of molecular structure from the all-particle wave function

Structural information is extracted from the all-particle (non-Born-Oppenheimer) wave function by calculating radial and angular densities derived from n-particle densities. As a result, one- and two-dimensional motifs of classical molecular structure can be recognized in quantum mechanics. Numerical examples are presented for three- (H(-), Ps(-), H(2)(+)), four- (Ps(2), H(2)), and five-particle (H(2)D(+)) systems.