Well-defined crosslinked materials via ring opening metathesis polymerisation

The work reported here is part of our ongoing programme of work directed. towards the synthesis and characterisation of polymeric materials via ROMP-RIM and ROMP-RTM. It describes the synthesis and characterisation of well-defined linear and crosslinked polymeric materials via ROMP-RTM. The process involves in-mould polymerisation of monofunctional imidonorbornene monomers, with different alkyl side chain lengths, to give a range of linear polymers. The process also involves in-mould copolymerisation of monofunctional imidonorbornene monomers, with different alkyl side chain lengths and difunctional monomers with different alkylene spacer lengths, to produce well-defined crosslinked polymers. The glass transition temperature (T_g) of the linear polymers was found to depend on the length of the alkyl side chain. For the crosslinked materials the results show that as the percentage of the difunctional, crosslinking unit, is increased (1, 5 and 10 molar percentage of the difunctional monomer) the glass transition shifts to a higher temperature, the height of the tanδ peak decreases and the plateau shear modulus above T_g increases. These results are as expected for an increase in the crosslink density of a polymer.     

Influence of hybrid nanofluids and heat generation on coupled heat and mass transfer flow of a viscous fluid with novel fractional derivative

Journal of Thermal Analysis and Calorimetry - In this paper, it has been discussed a nonlocal fractional model of viscous nanofluid holding a hybrid nanostructure. Hybridized copper (Cu) and...     

Synthesis of fluorinated polymers via ROMP: a review

This review is concerned with the work conducted in the Durham group during the last twenty years. It is specifically concerned with ROMP of fluorinated monomers with classical and well-defined initiators, with the synthesis of stereoregular polymers, block and stereoblock copolymers.     

Optimal synchronization of fractional-order chaotic systems subject to unknown fractional order,input nonlinearities and uncertain dynamic using type-2 fuzzy CMAC

Nonlinear Dynamics - In this paper, a new robust optimal control strategy is presented to synchronize a class of fractional-order chaotic systems with unknown fractional orders, uncertain dynamics...     

Potentiometric detection in UPLC as an easy alternative to determine cocaine in biological samples

The analytical methods which are often used for the determination of cocaine in complex biological matrices are a prescreening immunoassay and confirmation by chromatography combined with mass spectrometry. We suggest an ultra‐high‐pressure liquid chromatography combined with a potentiometric detector, as a fast and practical method to detect and quantify cocaine in biological samples. An adsorption/desorption model was used to investigate the usefulness of the potentiometric detector to determine cocaine in complex matrices. Detection limits of 6.3 ng mL^?1 were obtained in plasma and urine, which is below the maximum residue limit (MRL) of 25 ng mL^?1. A set of seven plasma samples and 10 urine samples were classified identically by both methods as exceeding the MRL or being inferior to it. The results obtained with the UPLC/potentiometric detection method were compared with the results obtained with the UPLC/MS method for samples spiked with varying cocaine concentrations. The intraclass correlation coefficient was 0.997 for serum (n =7) and 0.977 for urine (n =8). As liquid chromatography is an established technique, and as potentiometry is very simple and cost‐effective in terms of equipment, we believe that this method is potentially easy, inexpensive, fast and reliable. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Catalytic hydrolysis of sucrose in the presence of vanadium oxide nanoparticles on SiO2

The kinetics of heterogeneous catalytic hydrolysis of sucrose in the presence of the V₂O₅/SiO₂ catalyst was studied using polarimetry. The optimum conditions for the reaction were selected. The activation parameters were calculated from the Arrhenius and Eyring equations. The particle size of the catalyst was determined by X-ray diffraction analysis.     

Simplex-like sequential methods for a class of generalized fractional programs

A sequential method for a class of generalized fractional programming problems is proposed. The considered objective function is the ratio of powers of affine functions and the feasible region is a polyhedron, not necessarily bounded. Theoretical properties of the optimization problem are first established and the maximal domains of pseudoconcavity are characterized. When the objective function is pseudoconcave in the feasible region, the proposed algorithm takes advantage of the nice optimization properties of pseudoconcave functions; the particular structure of the objective function allows to provide a simplex-like algorithm even when the objective function is not pseudoconcave. Computational results validate the nice performance of the proposed algorithm.     

Carbon nanospheres covalently modified with polydimethylsiloxane on a porous sol–gel support for use in headspace solid-phase fiber microextraction of BTEX

Microchimica Acta - Carbon nanospheres were covalently modified with hydroxy-terminated poly(dimethylsiloxane) to give a new sorbent (referred to as CNS-PDMS). It was applied as the extraction...     

Nanoclusters formation in ion mobility spectrometry and change separation selectivity of picoline isomers

Ion mobility spectrometry (IMS) was applied to determine the influence of structural features of nanocluster formation of picoline isomers in ion mobility spectrometry. Since the results of our studies show that different isomers have the same mobilities in pure nitrogen buffer gas and their corresponding peaks are totally overlapped, 2-butanol vapor was introduced into buffer gas by means of an online system from 0 to 300 mL min^?1. We found different structural features of these isomeric compounds which cause distinct differences in ion mobility spectra. These differences result from the formation of different nanocluster product ions (~1 nm³) with different cross section areas formed depending on the occurrence of certain structural features (position of the methyl group on the pyridine ring). The size of cluster product ions formed was determined using cross section area measurements. The effects of temperature in the range from 80 to 200 °C and electric field strength have also been investigated. At 140–160 °C and 636 V cm^?1, optimum peak-to-peak resolution can be obtained.