Stress concentration and effective stiffness of aligned fiber reinforced composite with anisotropic constituents

The paper addresses the problem of calculation of the local stress field and effective elastic properties of a unidirectional fiber reinforced composite with anisotropic constituents. For this aim, the representative unit cell approach has been utilized. The micro geometry of the composite is modeled by a periodic structure with a unit cell containing multiple circular fibers. The number of fibers is sufficient to account for the micro structure statistics of composite. A new method based on the multipole expansion technique is developed to obtain the exact series solution for the micro stress field. The method combines the principle of superposition, technique of complex potentials and some new results in the theory of special functions. A proper choice of potentials and new results for their series expansions allow one to reduce the boundary-value problem for the multiple-connected domain to an ordinary, well-posed set of linear algebraic equations. This reduction provides high numerical efficiency of the developed method. Exact expressions for the components of the effective stiffness tensor have been obtained by analytical averaging of the strain and stress fields.     

Chlorination of aromatic substrates catalyzed by the phthalocyanine complexes

The chlorination of benzene, toluene, and o-xylene with molecular chlorine in the presence of the phthalocyanine complexes of different structures was studied. The transformations of the catalysts during the reaction were investigated. Published in Russian in Izvestiya Akademii Nauk. Seriya Khimicheskaya, No. 8, pp. 1644–1647, August, 2008.     

Thermodynamic parameters of urethane formation reactions and concomitant processes

Thermodynamic parameters of reactions of methyl and phenyl isocyanates with a series of compounds were determined by quantum-chemical calculations. The products of these reactions model for various functional groups present in commercial polyurethanes. The thermodynamic stability series for compounds formed from aliphatic and aromatic isocyanates were constructed.     

New approach to processing of chlorine-containing wastes: Synthesis of 2,3-dichloropropene from 1,2,3-trichloropropane

Possibilities of utilization of by-products formed in manufacture of epichlorohydrin are considered. A promising way to utilize wastes from production of epichlorohydrin by synthesis of 2,3-dichloropropene from 1,2,3-trichloropropane is suggested.     

Influence of the composition of the polymer matrix on the electrooptical properties of films with a dispersed liquid crystal

Polymer films with a dispersed liquid crystal were prepared by photopolymerization of (meth)acrylic monomers. The electrooptical properties of these films were studied. The influence exerted by the composition of the monomer mixture, cross-linking agents, and chain-transfer agent on the liquid crystal drop size and on the transmission of the polymer-liquid crystal films was examined.     

Combined supercritical-fluid chromatography/mass spectrometry in the analysis of diuron in plasma using on-line phase-system switching

On-line sample pretreatment by means of the phase-system switching approach is an interesting technique for the analysis of aqueous samples, e.g., plasma, by means of supercritical-fluid chromatography. In order to analyse plasma samples the following analytical procedure is used. The plasma sample is injected on to a short precolumn, which is washed with water and subsequently dried with nitrogen. Next, the solutes are desorbed with the supercritical mobile phase, analysed with packed-column supercritical-fluid chromatography and detected with either a UV detector or a mass spectrometer, equipped with a moving-belt interface. The herbicide diuron is selected as a test compound to study the feasibility of this approach. Using a selective detector the procedure is sufficiently sensitive to detect diuron in plasma, but not appropriate to detect the diuron metabolites in a post-mortem plasma sample. These have been identified with liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry. The detection limit of diuron in plasma using the procedure described is about 30 ng/mL.     

Reply to Nathan: How to reconstruct the causal argument

Nicholas Nathan tries to resist the current version of the causal argument for sense-data in two ways. First he suggests that, on what he considers to be the correct re-construction of the argument, it equivocates on the sense of proximate cause. Second he defends a form of disjunctivism, by claiming that there might be an extra mechanism involved in producing veridical hallucination, that is not present in perception. I argue that Nathan’s reconstruction of the argument is not the appropriate one, and that, properly interpreted, the argument does not equivocate on proximate cause. Furthermore, I claim that his postulation of a modified mechanism for hallucinations is implausibly ad hoc.     

Fractional Derivatives Applied to Phase-Space Reconstructions

The concept and application of phase-space reconstructions are reviewed. Fractional derivatives are then proposed for the purpose of reconstructing dynamics from a single observed time history. A procedure is presented in which the fractional derivatives of time series data are obtained in the frequency domain. The method is applied to the Lorenz system. The ability of the method to unfold the data is assessed by the method of global false nearest neighbors. The reconstructed data is used to compute recurrences and correlation dimensions. The reconstruction is compared to the commonly used method of delays in order to assess the choice of reconstruction parameters, and also the quality of results.     

An improved numerical simulator for multiphase flow in porous media

In basin modelling the thermodynamics of a multicomponent multiphase fluid flux are computationally too expensive when derived from an equation of state and the Gibbs equality constraints. In this article we present a novel implicit molar mass formulation technique using binary mixture thermodynamics. The two proposed solution methods, with and without cross derivative terms between components, are based on a preconditioned Newton‐GMRES scheme for each time‐step with analytical computation of the derivatives. These new algorithms reduce significantly the numerical effort for the computation of the molar masses, and we illustrate the behavior of these methods with numerical computations. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.