Roles of rhenium diimine complexes as metal‐ion probes and photosensitizers in functional polyurethanes

Polyurethanes incorporated with rhenium diimine complexes were synthesized. The polymers exhibited interesting morphologies and solution properties. Results from gel permeation chromatography suggested the formation of polymer aggregates in solutions. The polymers could act as probes for metal ions. The addition of metal ions to polymer solutions led to significant changes in the electronic absorption properties of the polymer solutions. This was attributed to the interactions between the polyether moieties and metal ions. The metal complexes could also act as efficient photosensitizers. After doping with charge‐transport viologens, the photoconductivity of the polymers was greatly enhanced. The experimental quantum efficiency was simulated with Onsager's theory. The thermalization distances and the primary yields were typically 12–14 Å and 10^?3, respectively. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Polym Sci Part A: Polym Chem 41: 1708–1715, 2003     

On the orthogonality of natural modes of vibration

The natural modes of a discrete linear system are orthogonal with respect to the mass and stiffness matrices in a generalized sense. However, these modes are usually not orthogonal to each other in the ordinary sense. The purpose of this paper is to document a number of conditions under which the modes are also orthogonal in an ordinary fashion.     

A Characterisation of Posets that Are nearly Antichains

We present a characterisation of posets of size n with linear discrepancy n − 2. These are the posets that are “furthest” from a linear order without being an antichain. This revised version was published online in September 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Invariant ideals of twisted crossed products

We will prove a result concerning the inclusion of non-trivial invariant ideals inside non-trivial ideals of a twisted crossed product. We will also give results concerning the primeness and simplicity of crossed products of twisted actions of locally compact groups on -algebras. Received: 25 January 2002; in final form: 22 May 2002/Published online: 2 December 2002 This work is partially supported by Hong Kong RGC Direct Grant.     

A boundary element method for the calculation of noise barrier insertion loss in the presence of atmospheric turbulence

Atmospheric turbulence is an important factor that limits the amount of attenuation a barrier can provide in the outdoor environment. It is therefore important to develop a reliable method to predict its effect on barrier performance. The boundary element method (BEM) has been shown to be a very effective technique for predicting barrier insertion loss in the absence of turbulence. This paper develops a simple and efficient modification of the BEM formulation to predict the insertion loss of a barrier in the presence of atmospheric turbulence. The modification is based on two alternative methods: (1) random realisations of log-amplitude and phase fluctuations of boundary sources and (2) de-correlation of source coherence using the mutual coherence function (MCF). An investigation into the behaviours of these two methods is carried out and simplified forms of the methods developed. Some systematic differences between the predictions from the methods are found. When incorporated into the BEM formulation, the method of random realisations and the method of MCF de-correlation provide predictions that agree well with predictions by the parabolic equation method and by the scattering cross-section method on a variety of thin barrier configurations.     

Correlation of Plasma Sprayed Coating Deposition Efficiency with Volume Flux Measurements by Phase Doppler Anemometry (PDA)

The use of phase-Doppler anemometry (PDA) to characterize the detail in-flight plasma sprayed particle behavior has been demonstrated previously [Ma et al. Plasma Chem Plasma Process 24(1):85; 25(1):56] The present articles shows further that a direct relationship may exist between the PDA measured particle volume flux and the coating microstructure and deposition efficiency (DE). In the situation when the precise particle temperature information is not available, the PDA measured particle volume flux may provide an alternative to predict quantitatively the variation of the coating microstructure and the DE. By monitoring the in-flight particle volume flux variations, instead of the particle velocity, size and temperature individually and simultaneously, the optimal settings of the plasma spraying parameters may also be determined conveniently. However, it is noted that the effective applications of such approach depend largely on the particle surface morphology and the pre-determination of the particle size range.     

Robust Bayesian Inference for Seemingly Unrelated Regressions with Elliptical Errors

Bayesian inference is considered for the seemingly unrelated regressions with an elliptically contoured error distribution. We show that the posterior distribution of the regression parameters and the predictive distribution of future observations under elliptical errors assumption are identical to those obtained under independently distributed normal errors when an improper prior is used. This gives inference robustness with respect to departures from the reference case of independent sampling from the normal distribution.     

Structural and spectroscopic analysis of hot filament decomposed ethylene deposited at low temperature on silicon surface

The deposition of decomposed ethylene on silicon wafer at lower temperature using hot filament chemical vapor deposition (HFCVD) method was applied to compose thin film of carbon and its compounds with silicon and hydrocarbon structures. The films were analyzed using Raman spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction, and scanning electron microscopy with elemental microanalysis by energy dispersive X-ray spectrometer. The structure and morphology of the early stage of the film deposition was analyzed. The obtaining of SiC as well as diamond-like structure with this method and catalytic influence of chemical admixtures on the film structure and properties are discussed.     

A projection method for solving incompressible viscous flows on domains with moving boundaries

In this paper, a projection method is presented for solving the flow problems in domains with moving boundaries. In order to track the movement of the domain boundaries, arbitrary‐Lagrangian–Eulerian (ALE) co‐ordinates are used. The unsteady incompressible Navier–Stokes equations on the ALE co‐ordinates are solved by using a projection method developed in this paper. This projection method is based on the Bell's Godunov‐projection method. However, substantial changes are made so that this algorithm is capable of solving the ALE form of incompressible Navier–Stokes equations. Multi‐block structured grids are used to discretize the flow domains. The grid velocity is not explicitly computed; instead the volume change is used to account for the effect of grid movement. A new method is also proposed to compute the freestream capturing metrics so that the geometric conservation law (GCL) can be satisfied exactly in this algorithm. This projection method is also parallelized so that the state of the art high performance computers can be used to match the computation cost associated with the moving grid calculations. Several test cases are solved to verify the performance of this moving‐grid projection method. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley Sons, Ltd.