Coated wire silver-ion selective electrode based on a N,N'-bis(2-thienylmethylene)-1,2-diaminobenzene.

A novel membrane coated platinum-wire electrode (MCPWE) based on N,N'-bis(2-thienylmethylene)-1,2-diaminobenzene (BTMD) for highly selective determination of Ag+ ion has been developed. The influences of membrane composition and pH on the potentiometric responses of electrode were investigated. The potentiometric responses are independent of the pH of the test solution in the range of 5.0 - 9.0. The electrode shows a linear response for Ag+ ion over the concentration range of 1.0 x 10(-60 to 1.0 x 10(-1) M with a lower detection limit of 6.0 x 10(-7) M. The electrode possesses a Nernstian slope of 59.7 mV decade(-1) and a fast response time of < or = 17 s and can be used for at least 2 months without any observable deviation. The proposed electrode displayed very good selectivity for Ag+ ion with respect to NH4+ and alkali, alkaline earth and some common transition metal ions. The practical utility of the electrode has been demonstrated by its use as the indicator electrode in the potentiometric titration of an AgNO3 solution with a NaI solution and in determination of the silver content of a developed radiological film.     

Simultaneous kinetic-spectrophotometric determination of hydrazine and acetylhydrazine in micellar media using the H-point standard addition method.

The H-point standard addition method (HPSAM), based on a spectrophotometric measurement for the simultaneous determination of hydrazine and acetylhydrazine, is described. This method is based on the difference between the rates of their reactions with N,N-dimethylaminobenzaldehyde (DAB) in the presence of sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS) in acidic media. The results showed that hydrazine and acetylhydrazine could be determined simultaneously in the range of 0.020 - 0.70 and 0.20 - 5.0 mg L(-1), respectively. Under the working conditions, the proposed method was successfully applied to the simultaneous determination of hydrazine and acetylhydrazine in several synthetic mixtures and plasma and water samples.     

Fractions continues de matrices,convergence et applications

The aim of this article is to give some property of continued fraction with matrices arguments, about their convergence and others applications. At the end of this work, we present a resolution of the Algebraic Riccati Equation by giving an explicit continued fraction development of its solution. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Impact of Partial Separability on Large-Scale Optimization

ELSO is an environment for the solution oflarge-scale optimization problems. With ELSO the user is required to provide only code for the evaluation of a partially separable function. ELSO exploits the partialseparability structure of the function to computethe gradient efficiently using automatic differentiation.We demonstrate ELSO's efficiency by comparing thevarious options available in ELSO.Our conclusion is that the hybrid option in ELSOprovides performance comparable to the hand-coded option, while having the significantadvantage of not requiring a hand-coded gradient orthe sparsity pattern of the partially separable function.In our test problems, which have carefully coded gradients,the computing time for the hybrid AD option is within a factor of two of thehand-coded option.     

Some inequalities for the polar derivative of a polynomial

LetP(z) be a polynomial of degreen which does not vanish in |z|<1. In this paper, we estimate the maximum and minimum moduli of thekth polar derivative ofP(z) on |z|=1 and thereby obtain compact generalizations of some known results, which among other results, yields interesting refinements of Erdos-Lax theorem and a theorem of Ankeny and Rivlin.     

Investigation on Ochratoxin A stability using different extraction techniques

The stability of Ochratoxin A during its extraction using different extraction techniques has been evaluated. Microwave-assisted extraction and pressurised liquid extraction, in addition to two other reference methods of extraction, i.e. ultrasound-assisted and magnetic stirring-assisted extraction, were evaluated. The effect of extraction temperature using the cited techniques was checked.The results show that Ochratoxin A can be extracted using microwave-assisted extraction at temperatures up to 150 °C without degradation. Pressurised liquid extraction can be used at temperatures up to 100 °C, for extraction times of less than 30 min. Further, both ultrasound-assisted extraction and magnetic stirring extraction can be applied at temperatures up to 65 °C.High-performance liquid chromatography combined with fluorescence detection using a Chromolith RP-18e column at a flow rate of 5 mL min⁻¹ was used to quantify the Ochratoxin A. The retention time for the Ochratoxin A was 1.3 min. The limits of detection (LOD) and of quantification (LOQ) were 0.03 and 0.10 μg L⁻¹, respectively.     

The convex hull property and topology of hypersurfaces with nonnegative curvature

We prove that, in Euclidean space, any nonnegatively curved, compact, smoothly immersed hypersurface lies outside the convex hull of its boundary, provided the boundary satisfies certain required conditions. This gives a convex hull property, dual to the classical one for surfaces with nonpositive curvature. A version of this result in the nonsmooth category is obtained as well. We show that our boundary conditions determine the topology of the surface up to at most two choices. The proof is based on uniform estimates for radii of convexity of these surfaces under a clipping procedure, a noncollapsing convergence theorem, and a gluing procedure.     

Synthesis and Photochemistry of Novel 3,5-Diacetyl-1,4-dihydropyridines. II [1]

In continuation of previous work some novel 3,5-diacetyl-1,4-dihydropyridine derivatives were synthesized and their photochemical behavior was studied under oxygen and argon atmosphere. Oxidation of the dihydropyridine ring and formation of pyridine derivatives was the result of the reaction. The presence of oxygen affects not only on the rate of oxidation, but also the formation of some unidentified by-products was observed on irradiation under this atmosphere.