Experimental analysis of concrete behavior under high confinement: Effect of the saturation ratio

This study focuses on the identification of concrete behavior under severe triaxial loading in order to better evaluate the vulnerability of sensitive infrastructure to near-field detonations or ballistic impacts. For the purpose of reproducing high stress levels with well-controlled loading paths, static tests have been conducted on concrete samples using a triaxial press offering very high capacities (stress levels of around 1 GPa). It is a well-known fact that the concrete drying process is a slow phenomenon. Massive concrete structures, such as bridge piers, dams and nuclear reactors, could retain a quasi-saturated core throughout most of their lifetime, even though their facing dries very quickly. The objective of this article is to evaluate the effect of the saturation ratio on concrete behavior under high confinement; this article will present triaxial test results on concrete samples over a saturation ratio range extending from dried to quasi-saturated concretes. The subsequent analysis of results will show that the saturation ratio exerts a major influence on concrete behavior, particularly on both the concrete strength capacity and shape of the limit state curve for saturation ratios above 50%. This analysis also highlights that while the strength of dried concrete strongly increases with confining pressure, it remains constant over a given confining pressure range for either wet or saturated samples.     

High tilt antiferroelectric esters bearing a perfluorobutanoyloxy terminal chain: the influence of lateral fluoro substituents on mesomorphic behaviour, tilt angle, and spontaneous polarization

Novel liquid crystalline esters have been synthesized with a perfluorocarbonyloxy terminal chain and lateral fluoro substituents in order to determine their influence on mesomorphic behaviour, tilt angle and spontaneous polarization. Certain locations of lateral fluoro substituents provide for very low melting points and reasonably wide temperature ranges of the antiferroelectric phase, and can generate enhanced tilt angles of up to 45°, although spontaneous polarization is always lower than for the parent system without lateral fluoro substituents. Thus, these novel materials, particularly as components in mixtures, should be useful in high tilt antiferroelectric (orthoconic) applications.     

Standardized Characterization of Electrocatalytic Electrodes

This paper investigates the utility of ‘cross–lab’ comparative analysis of electrocatalytic electrode performance using standardized modular stack cells and test protocols. Using poly(methylene green)‐modified glassy carbon electrodes as the model system, we characterized electrode fabrication and performance with respect to the catalytic oxidation of NADH at neutral pH and low overpotential. Three sets of experiments were duplicated across four independent laboratories and the experimental results from each set were analyzed and compared in terms of key electroanalytical parameters. Statistical analyses were performed at three distinct levels: 1) the standard deviation among repetitive cycles within an experiment; 2) the standard deviation among repetitive experiments in the same laboratory, and 3) the standard deviation among experiments performed across all four laboratories. Using predefined criteria of ‘reproducibility’ for each level, most parameters were found to be statistically reproducible at most levels. When a particular parameter was found to be irreproducible in a given level, commentary is given on how that information can be used diagnose what chemical/physical aspects of the process were uncontrolled or poorly understood and therefore candidates for future research. This exercise, which is presented as a ‘proof–of‐principle’ step towards the concept of standardizing electrocatalytic evaluation, illustrates the importance of executing electrochemical characterization protocols across several labs and using fixed geometry and dimensions, system configuration, and applied electrochemical conditions. Future work is under way to extend these principles to systems with fluid flow.     

Résolution en temps court d'une équation de Hamilton–Jacobi non locale décrivant la dynamique d'une dislocation

This Note studies a nonlocal geometric Hamilton–Jacobi equation that models the motion of a planar dislocation in a crystal. Within the framework of viscosity solutions and of the level-set approach, we show that the equation has a unique solution on a small time interval when the initial curve is the graph of a Lipschitz bounded function. To cite this article: O. Alvarez et al., C. R. Acad. Sci. Paris, Ser. I 338 (2004).     

Engineering of Challenging G Protein-Coupled Receptors for Structure Determination and Biophysical Studies

Membrane proteins such as G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) exert fundamental biological functions and are involved in a multitude of physiological responses, making these receptors ideal drug targets. Drug discovery programs targeting GPCRs have been greatly facilitated by the emergence of high-resolution structures and the resulting opportunities to identify new chemical entities through structure-based drug design. To enable the determination of high-resolution structures of GPCRs, most receptors have to be engineered to overcome intrinsic hurdles such as their poor stability and low expression levels. In recent years, multiple engineering approaches have been developed to specifically address the technical difficulties of working with GPCRs, which are now beginning to make more challenging receptors accessible to detailed studies. Importantly, successfully engineered GPCRs are not only valuable in X-ray crystallography, but further enable biophysical studies with nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, surface plasmon resonance, native mass spectrometry, and fluorescence anisotropy measurements, all of which are important for the detailed mechanistic understanding, which is the prerequisite for successful drug design. Here, we summarize engineering strategies based on directed evolution to reduce workload and enable biophysical experiments of particularly challenging GPCRs.     

Irreducibility criteria for compositions of polynomials with integer coefficients

We provide irreducibility criteria for some classes of compositions of polynomials with integer coefficients of the form \(F\circ G\), with F being a quadratic irreducible polynomial and G a polynomial of arbitrary degree.     

A computational fluid mechanics solution to the Monge-Kantorovich mass transfer problem

Summary. The Monge-Kantorovich mass transfer problem [31] is reset in a fluid mechanics framework and numerically solved by an augmented Lagrangian method. Received August 30, 1998 / Published online September 24, 1999     

Retracts of Products of Chordal Graphs

In this article, we characterize the graphs G that are the retracts of Cartesian products of chordal graphs. We show that they are exactly the weakly modular graphs that do not contain K_{2, 3}, the 4‐wheel minus one spoke , and the k‐wheels (for as induced subgraphs. We also show that these graphs G are exactly the cage‐amalgamation graphs as introduced by Bre?ar and Tepeh Horvat (Cage‐amalgamation graphs, a common generalization of chordal and median graphs, Eur J Combin 30 (2009), 1071–1081); this solves the open question raised by these authors. Finally, we prove that replacing all products of cliques of G by products of Euclidean simplices, we obtain a polyhedral cell complex which, endowed with an intrinsic Euclidean metric, is a CAT(0) space. This generalizes similar results about median graphs as retracts of hypercubes (products of edges) and median graphs as 1‐skeletons of CAT(0) cubical complexes. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J. Graph Theory 73: 161–180, 2013     

Some Pólya-Type Irreducibility Criteria for Multivariate Polynomials

We provide irreducibility criteria for multivariate polynomials with coefficients in an arbitrary field that extend a classical result of Pólya for polynomials with integer coefficients. In particular, we provide irreducibility conditions for polynomials of the form f(X)(Y ? f ₁(X))…(Y ? f _n (X)) + g(X), with f, f ₁, ?, f _n , g univariate polynomials over an arbitrary field.