High-pressure foaming properties of carbon dioxide-saturated emulsions

The aeration of emulsions with tailored properties and structure is of widespread importance in processing of foods and cosmetics. This report addresses the micro-cellular foam formation of carbon dioxide-saturated oil-in-water emulsions triggered by the application of a controlled pressure drop. The experimental setup combines a stirred pressure vessel with a pressure cell-equipped rheometer and pneumatic expansion valves. This allows to systematically study the process of gas dissolution, bubble nucleation, and growth under defined pressure, temperature, and flow conditions. Investigations on the impact of relevant process parameters show that dissolved gas fraction, emulsion viscosity, and shear rate have a major influence on foam formation. Dissolution of carbon dioxide leads to a viscosity reduction of the emulsion which and is described by a viscosity reduction factor. The point of bubble nucleation is derived from rheological patterns during depressurization. Experiments show that lower emulsion viscosity and higher shear rate favor bubble nucleation upon pressure release. Rheological results are supported by video analysis as the setup allows capturing nucleation, growth, and destabilization of bubbles as a function of pressure, supersaturation, and time. The results of this work yield the understanding of the high-pressure foaming mechanism from a rheological perspective and foster the design of such processes.     

FTIR spectroscopic characterization of the adsorption and desorption of ammonia on MgO surfaces

In the present paper an attempt is made to disentangle the complex IR spectra obtained in the course of the adsorption of NH₃ on high surface area MgO. For this purpose two simplifications were introduced in comparison to previous studies: (a) Only uniformly hydroxylated MgO surfaces (degassing temperature: 200 °C) and completely dehydroxylated MgO surfaces (degassing temperature: 1000 °C) were used as adsorbent, (b) The equilibrium pressure of the adsorbate NH₃ was generally maintained below 200 Pa in all adsorption and desorption experiments. Under these conditions the position and the pressure dependence of the resulting bands may consistently be interpreted in terms of characteristic surface species. Only the completely dehydroxylated MgO surface gives rise to a heterolytic dissociation into neighbouring NH₂ and OH groups. In addition, NH₃ is physically adsorbed on less reactive sites via diverse types of hydrogen bonds. Less well defined hydroxylation states give rise to considerably more complicated spectra. In a first approximation they may be constructed by linearly combining two spectral patterns, one related to a uniformly hydroxylated and the other to a dehydroxylated surface. NH₃ pressures around and beyond 1 kPa give rise to significant changes of band positions and band shapes compared to those observed below 200 Pa. The interpretation of these effects which have previously been ignored must necessarily rely on more complicated models.     

Synthesis of 3-Adenyl- and 3-Thyminylcyclobutane-1,1-dimethanols and Their Homo-octameric Phosphodiesters

Starting from 3-(benzyloxy)cyclobutane-1,1-dimethanol, 3-thyminyl- and 3-adenylcyclobutane-1,1-dimethanol were synthesized by direct introduction of the heterocycles (Scheme 1). The mono-O-substituted methoxytrityl derivatives were separately converted to octameric phosphodiesters on an aminomethyl-polystyrene carrier by the phosphotriester method. These oligomers of carba-nucleosides were prepared in order to study their annealing behaviour towards ribo- and deoxyribo-nucleic acids as well as their potential for homologous hybridization.     

Determining zeroes of increasing Lipschitz functions

Summary We study the average case behavior of suitable algorithms to solve a nonlinear problem in numerical analysis: determining zeroes of increasing Lipschitz functions of one variable. The bisection method (which is optimal with respect to the maximal error over the whole class of functions) is far from being optimal in a more general sense: There are methods which behave like bisection in the worst case but which yield much better results on the average. We prove that the sequentially optimal algorithm found by Sukharev is also optimal in our average case setting.