Development of a Wine Metabolomics Approach for the Authenticity Assessment of Selected Greek Red Wines

Wine metabolomics constitutes a powerful discipline towards wine authenticity assessment through the simultaneous exploration of multiple classes of compounds in the wine matrix. Over the last decades, wines from autochthonous Greek grape varieties have become increasingly popular among wine connoisseurs, attracting great interest for their authentication and chemical characterization. In this work, 46 red wine samples from Agiorgitiko and Xinomavro grape varieties were collected from wineries in two important winemaking regions of Greece during two consecutive vintages and analyzed using ultra-high performance liquid chromatography-quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry (UHPLC-QToF-MS). A targeted metabolomics methodology was developed, including the determination and quantification of 28 phenolic compounds from different classes (hydroxycinnamic acids, hydroxybenzoic acids, stilbenes and flavonoids). Moreover, 86 compounds were detected and tentatively identified via a robust suspect screening workflow using an in-house database of 420 wine related compounds. Supervised chemometric techniques were employed to build an accurate and robust model to discriminate between two varieties.     

Universal solutions for fiber-reinforced compressible isotropic elastic materials

Universal solutions for fiber-reinforced compressible isotropic elastic materials under large elastic deformations are obtained, by using inverse methods.The following deformations are investigated: bending, stretching and shearing of a rectangular block; straightening, stretching and shearing of a sector of a circular tube; inflation, eversion, extension, torsion, bending and shearing of a sector of a circular tube; inflation and eversion of a spherical shell.The significance of the reinforcement and the deformed configuration of the fibers is duscussed.

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Zusammenfassung Unter Benützung inverser Methoden werden universelle Lösungen für faser-vorgespanntes, Kompressibles, isotropes, elastisches Material angegeben.Die folgenden Deformationen werden untersucht: Biegung, Zug und Schub eines rechteckigen Blockes; Ausgradung, Zug und Schub eines Sektors eines Kreisrohrausschnitts; isotrope Dehnung, Umstülpung, Erweiterung, Tordierung, Biegung und Schub eines Sektors eines Kreisrohres; isotrope Dehnung und Umstülpung einer Kugelschale.Die Bedeutung der Vorspannung und der verformten Konfiguration der Fasern wird diskutiert.

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Graduate Student.     

Formation of alkane‐phosphonic acid self‐assembled monolayers on alumina: an in situ SPR study

The formation process of n‐alkane phosphonic acid CH₃ (CH₂)_n?1 PO(OH)₂ (n = 10,12,14,18) self‐assembled monolayers (SAMs), deposited from ethanol solutions on aluminum oxide, has been monitored in situ using surface plasmon resonance (SPR) spectroscopy. In addition, the two‐solvent approach is used to obtain both film thickness and refractive index of the fully formed adsorbed layers. A densely packed adsorbed layer is formed only for the longest molecules with n = 18. The chain length and solution concentration dependence of formation kinetics are studied, and the existence of two distinct kinetic steps is revealed. Fittings of the experimental results with various kinetic models are performed. Our analysis suggests that during the first kinetic step, a transition from a lying‐down to a standing‐up phase takes place, and the growth of this standing‐up phase is governed by second‐order kinetics. The second slow kinetic step is described by a modified first‐order Langmuir law. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Exact analysis of a two-workstation one-buffer flow line with parallel unreliable machines

This paper examines a model of a serial flow line with two workstations and an intermediate buffer. Each workstation consists of multiple unreliable parallel machines which are not necessarily identical, viz., the processing times, failure times and repair times of the parallel machines at each workstation are assumed to be exponentially distributed with non-identical mean rates. The system under consideration is solved via exact Markovian analysis. More specifically, a recursive algorithm that generates the transition matrix for any value of the intermediate buffer capacity is developed and all possible transition equations are derived and solved analytically. Once the transition equations are solved the performance measures of the model under consideration can be easily evaluated. This model may be used as a decomposition block for solving larger flow lines with parallel unreliable machines at each workstation.     

A polarization-/angle-insensitive, bandwidth-optimized, metamaterial absorber in the microwave regime

An enhanced metamaterial absorber based on the circumscribed-cross resonator is introduced in this paper. The new structure is polarization-independent, due to the symmetry of its unit cell, and is proven efficient for the attenuation of obliquely incident waves. The absorption mechanism is thoroughly investigated and is found to be mainly related to the losses of the dielectric substrate. Furthermore, by exploiting the scalability property of metamaterials, the operational bandwidth of our design can be drastically improved by placing unit cells with properly scaled resonators adjacent to each other. In this context, various combinations of three, four, and nine unit cells that can increase the full width at half maximum up to as much as 11.18?%, are developed. The overall performance of the proposed configurations is deemed promising for the realization of microwave metamaterial absorbers for several practical applications.     

Diastereocontrol in the intramolecular cycloadditions of 2-substituted-erythro-3,4-isopropylidenedioxyhex-5-enenitrile oxides

The influence of the 2-substituent on the diastereoselectivity of the intramolecular cycloadditions in a series of 2-substituted-erythro-3,4-isopropylidene-dioxyhex-5-enenitrile oxides, generated in situ from selected sugar derivatives, was examined.     

PMMA/organomodified montmorillonite nanocomposites prepared by in situ bulk polymerization

Kinetics of the in situ bulk polymerization of methyl methacrylate in the presence of organomodified montmorillonite (MMT) was investigated using differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) and gravimetrically. Different amount and types of MMT under the trade names Cloisite were employed. Using DSC, the amount of heat released versus time, under isothermal conditions, was recorded, and eventually, the time evolution of polymerization rate and monomer conversion was calculated. Results on the variation of monomer conversion with reaction time were in good agreement to corresponding from the gravimetric measurements. The nanocomposites prepared were characterized with WAXD, TEM and FTIR, and their glass transition temperature, T _g, was measured with DSC. Depending on the added amount of nano-MMT, either exfoliated or intercalated structures were obtained. An enhancement of the polymerization rate with the presence of the nanoparticles was observed especially in the gel effect region. This was accompanied by a higher T _g and average molecular weight, as measured by GPC, of all nanocomposites compared to neat PMMA.     

Estimate of the truncation error of finite volume discretization of the Navier–Stokes equations on colocated grids

A methodology is proposed for the calculation of the truncation error of finite volume discretizations of the incompressible Navier–Stokes equations on colocated grids. The truncation error is estimated by restricting the solution obtained on a given grid to a coarser grid and calculating the image of the discrete Navier–Stokes operator of the coarse grid on the restricted velocity and pressure field. The proposed methodology is not a new concept but its application to colocated finite volume discretizations of the incompressible Navier–Stokes equations is made possible by the introduction of a variant of the momentum interpolation technique for mass fluxes where the pressure part of the mass fluxes is not dependent on the coefficients of the linearized momentum equations. The theory presented is supported by a number of numerical experiments. The methodology is developed for two‐dimensional flows, but extension to three‐dimensional cases should not pose problems. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.