A Closed‐Loop Control Strategy for Producing Nitrile Rubber of Uniform Chemical Composition in a Semibatch Reactor: A Simulation Study

To improve the quality of industrial nitrile rubbers, the copolymer chemical composition, p_A(t), should ideally be kept constant along the reaction. This work proposes a closed‐loop control strategy for the semibatch operation of the reactor with the aim of regulating p_A(t) within a reduced range of variability. The proposed strategy is evaluated by simulating a mathematical model of the process. To this effect, a simplified mathematical model of the reaction is first derived and then utilized to obtain a suboptimal control law and a soft‐sensor that estimates the polymerization rates. The suboptimal control law is compensated by adding a term proportional to errors in p_A(t). The simulated example considers the production of the low‐composition AJLT grade, with the copolymerization reaction represented by a detailed mathematical model adjusted to an industrial plant. Due to the high performance of the soft‐sensor, the simulation results suggest that the proposed closed‐loop strategy is efficient to adequately regulate p_A(t) in spite of structural and parametric uncertainties, while other quality variables remained practically unaffected.     

Sufficient Conditions for a Digraph to be Supereulerian

A (di)graph is supereulerian if it contains a spanning eulerian sub(di)graph. This property is a relaxation of hamiltonicity. Inspired by this analogy with hamiltonian cycles and by similar results in supereulerian graph theory, we analyze a number of sufficient Ore type conditions for a digraph to be supereulerian. Furthermore, we study the following conjecture due to Thomassé and the first author: if the arc‐connectivity of a digraph is not smaller than its independence number, then the digraph is supereulerian. As a support for this conjecture we prove it for digraphs that are semicomplete multipartite or quasitransitive and verify the analogous statement for undirected graphs.     

On Convergence of Quasi ρ-preserving Locally Related Quasi-nonexpansive Mappings

The concept of quasi-nonexpansive mappings was initiated in Diaz and Metcalf (Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 73 (1967), 516–519), further it was generalized by Petryshyn and Williamson (Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications 43, no. 2 (1973): 459-497). Further investigating the above work, in this article a Banach space with a relation ρ has been considered, the notion of ρ-preserving and quasi ρ-preserving locally related quasi-nonexpansive mappings has been introduced. It has been shown that every ρ-preserving mapping is a quasi ρ-preserving and every nonexpansive mapping is locally related quasi-nonexpansive but converse may not hold. The necessary and sufficient conditions for the convergence of Picard, Mann and Ishikawa iterations of ρ-preserving, quasi ρ-preserving locally related quasi-nonexpansive mappings are presented.     

Convergence Theorems for Non-Self Mappings in CAT(0) Spaces

In this paper, we prove strong convergence of Mann iterative schemes to fixed points of multi-valued demicontractive non-self mappings in complete CAT(0) spaces under appropriate conditions. In addition, △? convergence or strong convergence of Mann iterative scheme to a fixed point of single-valued k-strictly pseudocontractive non-self mapping is obtained. Our theorems improve and unify most of the results in the literature.     

Bloch Constant on α-Bloch Mappings of the Unit Ball

This note is denoted to establishing sharp distortion theorems for subclasses of α-Bloch mappings defined in the unit ball of Cn with critical points.Furthermore,the estimates of Bloch constant with respect to these subclasses are given.