Soy protein–nanocellulose composite aerogels

Organic aerogels based on two important and widely abundant renewable resources, soy proteins (SP) and nanofibrillar cellulose (NFC) are developed from precursor aqueous dispersions and a facile method conducive of channel- and defect-free systems after cooling and freeze-drying cycles that yielded apparent densities on the order of 0.1 g/cm³. NFC loading drives the internal morphology of the composite aerogels to transition from network- to fibrillar-like, with high density of interconnected cells. Composite aerogels with SP loadings as high as ca. 70 % display a compression modulus of 4.4 MPa very close to that obtained from reference, pure NFC aerogels. Thus, the high compression modulus of the composite system is not compromised as long as a relatively low amount of reinforcing NFC is present. The composite materials gain moisture (up to 5 %) in equilibrium with 50 % RH air, independent of SP content. Furthermore, their physical integrity is unchanged upon immersion in polar and non-polar solvents. Fast liquid sorption rates are observed in the case of composite aerogels in contact with hexane. In contrast, water sorption is modulated by the chemical composition of the aerogel, with an important contribution from swelling. The potential functionalities of the newly developed SP–NFC composite green materials can benefit from the reduced material cost and the chemical features brought about the amino acids present in SPs.     

Investigation of Protein Binding With All Solid‐State Ion‐Selective Electrodes

A potentiometric sensor for studying charge based adsorption of proteins was created using a single‐piece polyaniline‐PVC ion‐selective electrode (ISE). Three different ISEs, two for Na⁺ and one for Cl^? ion determination, were studied. The Na⁺‐ISEs consisted of a neutral calixarene‐based ionophore and one with a charged carrier dinonylnapthalenesulfonic acid (DNNSA) whereas for the Cl^? ISE, an anion exchanger tridodecylmethylammonium chloride (TDDMA⁺Cl^?), was used. The Na⁺ ISE with DNNSA as the charged carrier was successfully able to discriminate the binding of two different proteins (bovine serum albumin and lysozyme) based on their intrinsic charge.     

Weakly diagonal algebras and definable principal congruences

An algebra is called weakly diagonal if every subuniverse of its square contains the graph of an automorphism. We show that every variety generated by a finite algebra with no proper subalgebras has a weakly diagonal generator. The result is applied in several ways and, in particular, to show that every arithmetical affine complete variety of finite type has equationally definable principal congruences. This paper is dedicated to Walter Taylor. Received February 22, 2005; accepted in final form June 3, 2005. Work of the first author was supported by grant No. 5368 from The Estonian Science Foundation.     

Weak toroidalization over non-closed fields

We prove that any dominant morphism of algebraic varieties over a field k of characteristic zero can be transformed into a toroidal (hence monomial) morphism by projective birational modifications of source and target. This was previously proved by the first and third author when k is algebraically closed. Moreover we show that certain additional requirements can be satisfied.     

1. Ueber die Einwirkung von Stickoxydgas auf Eisen-oxydull?sungen

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Characterization of Transfer Functions of Pritchard–Salamon or Other Realizations with a Bounded Input or Output Operator

We show that the transfer functions that have a (continuoustime) well-posed realization with a bounded input operator are exactly those that are strong-H² (plus constant feedthrough) over some right half-plane. The dual condition holds iff the transfer function has a realization with a bounded output operator. Both conditions hold iff the transfer function has a Pritchard–Salamon (PS) realization. A state-space variant of the PS result was proved already in [3], under the additional assumption that the weighting pattern (or impulse response) is a function (whose values are bounded operators). We illustrate by an example that this does not cover all PS systems, not even if the input and output spaces are separable.