Modelling procedures and properties of rubber in rolling contact

Rubber covered cylinders in rolling contact are studied in two cases; rolling over a flat surface and rolling over a groove. In the first case, two different finite element procedures are compared for the purpose of investigating if computational savings can be made when taking amplitude dependent effects into account by using a modified viscoelastic steady state rolling procedure. This procedure is compared with using a more expensive overlay method with an elastoplastic-viscoelastic material model. The two procedures and material models are shown two give equal results in the flat surface case. For the case of rolling over a groove, it is shown how the non-linear dynamic material characteristics of the rubber layer influence the rolling contact. The groove filling capacity of the rubber is shown to be strongly dependent on the material model. It is shown that amplitude dependent rubber materials have better ability to fill out contact surface irregularities such as a groove.     

2D SMARTCyp reactivity-based site of metabolism prediction for major drug-metabolizing cytochrome P450 enzymes

Cytochrome P450 (CYP) 3A4, 2D6, 2C9, 2C19, and 1A2 are the most important drug-metabolizing enzymes in the human liver. Knowledge of which parts of a drug molecule are subject to metabolic reactions catalyzed by these enzymes is crucial for rational drug design to mitigate ADME/toxicity issues. SMARTCyp, a recently developed 2D ligand structure-based method, is able to predict site-specific metabolic reactivity of CYP3A4 and CYP2D6 substrates with an accuracy that rivals the best and more computationally demanding 3D structure-based methods. In this article, the SMARTCyp approach was extended to predict the metabolic hotspots for CYP2C9, CYP2C19, and CYP1A2 substrates. This was accomplished by taking into account the impact of a key substrate-receptor recognition feature of each enzyme as a correction term to the SMARTCyp reactivity. The corrected reactivity was then used to rank order the likely sites of CYP-mediated metabolic reactions. For 60 CYP1A2 substrates, the observed major sites of CYP1A2 catalyzed metabolic reactions were among the top-ranked 1, 2, and 3 positions in 67%, 80%, and 83% of the cases, respectively. The results were similar to those obtained by MetaSite and the reactivity + docking approach. For 70 CYP2C9 substrates, the observed sites of CYP2C9 metabolism were among the top-ranked 1, 2, and 3 positions in 66%, 86%, and 87% of the cases, respectively. These results were better than the corresponding results of StarDrop version 5.0, which were 61%, 73%, and 77%, respectively. For 36 compounds metabolized by CYP2C19, the observed sites of metabolism were found to be among the top-ranked 1, 2, and 3 sites in 78%, 89%, and 94% of the cases, respectively. The computational procedure was implemented as an extension to the program SMARTCyp 2.0. With the extension, the program can now predict the site of metabolism for all five major drug-metabolizing enzymes with an accuracy similar to or better than that achieved by the best 3D structure-based methods. Both the Java source code and the binary executable of the program are freely available to interested users.     

Tuning the metal-adsorbate chemical bond through the ligand effect on platinum subsurface alloys

Scratching beneath the surface: Pt-M(3d)-Pt(111) (M(3d) = Co, Ni) bimetallic subsurface alloys have been designed to show the ligand effect tunes reactivity in oxygen and hydrogen adsorption systems. The platinum-oxygen bond order was investigated by oxygen atom projection in the occupied and unoccupied space using X-ray emission spectroscopy (XES) and X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS).     

The effect of loading and particle size on the oxygen reaction in CGO impregnated Pt electrodes

Porous platinum electrodes impregnated with Gd _x Ce_1−x O_2−δ (CGO) are investigated to characterise how nano-sized CGO grains affect the oxygen reaction. Impedance measurements were performed at temperatures between 450 and 750 °C and at oxygen partial pressures of 0.2 and 5 × 10⁻⁵ bar for electrodes with various CGO loadings and electrodes annealed at various temperatures. The morphology was characterised by scanning electron microscopy and the CGO grain size was determined from X-ray diffraction peak broadening. The results showed that the polarisation resistance decreased with increasing CGO loading and increasing annealing temperature. CGO facilitates transport of oxygen ions thereby increasing the effective triple-phase boundary.     

B-norsteroids from Hymenoscyphus pseudoalbidus

Two viridin-related B-norsteroids, B-norviridiol lactone (1) and B-norviridin enol (2), both possessing distinct unprecedented carbon skeletons, were isolated from a liquid culture of the ash dieback-causing fungus Hymenoscyphus pseudoalbidus. Compound 2 was found to degrade to a third B-norsteroidal compound, 1β-hydroxy-2α-hydro-asterogynin A (3), which was later detected in the original culture. The proposed structure of 1 is, regarding connectivity, identical to the original erroneous structure for TAEMC161, which was later reassigned as viridiol. Compound 2 showed an unprecedented 1H-13C HMBC correlation through an intramolecular hydrogen bond. The five-membered B-ring of compounds 1-3 was proposed to be formed by a benzilic acid rearrangement. The known compound asterogynin A was found to be formed from 3 by a β-elimination of water. All compounds were characterized by NMR spectroscopy, LC-HRMS and polarimetry.     

A convenient synthesis of phenols

Abstract

Anilines are rapidly, often within 60?minutes, converted into the corresponding phenols in up to 87% isolated yield. The presented experimentally simple protocol display broad compatibility with a variety of functional groups, and in particular, well suited for the preparation of methyl-substituted phenols. Such phenols are not easily available by other synthetic approaches. The formation of phenolic radical coupling products was not observed even for activated anilines using this open flask method.     

Viscoelastic phase diagram of fluorinated and grafted polymer films and proton‐exchange membranes for fuel cell applications

The influence of temperature and moisture activity on the viscoelastic behavior of fluorinated membranes for fuel cell applications was investigated. Uncrosslinked and crosslinked ethylene tetrafluoroethylene (ETFE)‐based proton‐conducting membranes were prepared by radiation grafting and subsequent sulfonation and their behavior was compared with ETFE base film and commercial Nafion^® NR212 membrane. Uniaxial tensile tests and stress relaxation tests at controlled temperature and relative humidity (RH) were carried out at 30 and 50 °C for 10% < RH < 90%. Grafted films were stiffer and exhibited stronger strain hardening when compared with ETFE. Similarly, both uncrosslinked and crosslinked membranes were stiffer and stronger than Nafion^®. Yield stress was found to decrease and moisture sensitivity to increase on sulfonation. The viscoelastic relaxation of the grafted films was found to obey a power‐law behavior with exponent equal to ?0.04 ± 0.01, a factor of almost 2 lower than ETFE, weakly influenced by moisture and temperature. Moreover, the grafted films presented a higher hygrothermal stability when compared with their membranes counterparts. In the case of membranes, a power‐law behavior at RH < 60% was also observed. However, a markedly different behavior was evident at RH > 60%, with an almost single relaxation time exponential. An exponential decrease of relaxation time with RH from 60 s to 10 s was obtained at RH ≥ 70% and 30 °C. The general behavior of grafted films observed at 30 °C was also obtained at 50 °C. However, an anomalous result was noticed for the membranes, with a higher modulus at 50 °C when compared with 30 °C. This behavior was explained by solvation of the sulfonic acid groups by water absorption creating hydrogen bonding within the clusters. A viscoelastic phase diagram was elaborated to map critical conditions (temperature and RH) for transitions in time‐dependent behavior, from power‐law scaling to exponential scaling. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J. Polym. Sci., Part B: Polym. Phys. 2013, 51, 1139–1148     

Recoil spectrometry: Ion accelerator based elemental characterisation of surface layers

Recoil Spectrometry covers a group of techniques that are very similar to the well known Rutherford backscattering Spectrometry technique, but with the important difference that one measures the recoiling target atom rather than the projectile ion. This makes it possible to determine both the identity of the recoil and its depth of origin from its energy and velocity, using a suitable detector system. The incident ion is typically high-energy (30–100MeV)³⁵C1,⁸¹Br or¹²⁷I. Low concentrations of light elements such as C, O and N can be profiled in a heavy matrix such as Fe or GaAs. Here we present an overview of mass and energy dispersive recoil Spectrometry and illustrate its successful use in some typical applications.     

Monitoring the aggregation of single casein micelles using fluorescence microscopy

The aggregation of casein micelles (CMs) induced by milk-clotting enzymes is a process of fundamental importance in the dairy industry for cheese production; however, it is not well characterized on the nanoscale. Here we enabled the monitoring of the kinetics of aggregation between single CMs (30-600 nm in diameter) by immobilizing them on a glass substrate at low densities and subsequently imaging them with fluorescence microscopy. We validated the new method by a quantitative comparison to ensemble measurements of aggregation. Single-particle statistics allowed us to observe for the first time several heterogeneities in CM aggregation. We observed two types of CM growth: a slow increase in the size of CMs and a stepwise increase attributed to interactions between aggregates preformed in solution. Both types of growth exhibit a lag phase that was very heterogeneous between different CMs, suggesting significant differences in their composition or structure. Detailed size histograms of CMs during aggregation also revealed the presence of two distinct subpopulations with different growth amplitudes and kinetics. The dependence of these distinct nanoscale processes/parameters on aggregation conditions is not accessible to bulk measurements that report only ensemble-average values and may prove important to an in-depth understanding of CM aggregation.