Water content distribution in a polymer electrolyte membrane for advanced fuel cell system with liquid water supply

To better understand the operation of a new fuel cell design, we used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to measure the water content distribution in a polymer electrolyte membrane under fuel cell operation with and without a supply of liquid water. The supply of liquid water to the membrane improved the cell performance by increasing the water content in the membrane and thus reducing the electrical resistance of the membrane. The study also showed that MRI is a promising method to investigate the distribution of water in the membrane of a fuel cell under operating conditions.     

Evidence for strain glass in the ferroelastic-martensitic system Ti(50-x)Ni(50+x)

We report here "strain glass," a new glassy phenomenon in ferroelastic-martensitic system of Ni-rich intermetallic Ti(50-x)Ni(50+x) (x > 1), where local strain is frozen in disordered configuration below a critical temperature Tg. The ac elastic modulus shows a minimum at Tg, which exhibits logarithmic frequency dependence following Vogel-Fulcher relationship, and the corresponding internal friction shows a frequency-dependent peak located at a lower temperature. In situ high-resolution transmission electron microscopy observations reveal uncorrelated nanoclusters of martensiticlike phase, randomly frozen in the otherwise untransformed parentlike matrix. Being parallel to spin glass and relaxor, strain glass may shed new light on the fundamental physics of glass and lead to the discovery of novel properties.     

Boundedness of integral operators on generalized Morrey spaces and its application to Schrödinger operators

In this paper, we study boundedness of integral operators on generalized Morrey spaces and its application to estimates in Morrey spaces for the Schrödinger operator with nonnegative (reverse Hölder class) and small perturbed potentials .

     

The surjectivity of the canonical homomorphism from singular homology to Cech homology

Let be a locally -connected compact metric space. Then, the canonical homomorphism from the singular homology group to the Cech homology group is surjective. Consequently, if a compact metric space is locally connected, then the canonical homomorphism from to is surjective.

     

Adsorption and structure of methyl mercaptoacetate on Cu(1 1 1) surface by XPS and NEXAFS spectroscopy

Methyl mercaptoacetate (MA) on Cu(1 1 1) surface was investigated using synchrotron radiation-based X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and near-edge X-ray absorption fine structure (NEXAFS) spectroscopy. MA adsorbs on the surface via thiolate formation and weak interaction of the carbonyl group with the surface. Two different adsorption states previously reported for methanethiolate and ethanethiolate were confirmed, besides atomic sulfur. NEXAFS measurements support gauche-type conformation of MA whose skeleton lies on the surface.     

An effective noise removal technique for recovering the shapes of diamond abrasive grains in SLM images degraded by clustered spike noise

A new noise-removal technique is applied to scanning laser microscopic (SLM) images to remove clustered spike noise in the images and to recover the shapes of diamond abrasive grains degraded by the noise. For achievement of this purpose, noise points in the SLM image are accurately detected by taking advantage of their properties in the space and spatial-frequency regions. The noise points are removed by a method of smoothing that is based on linear interpolation; that is, their pixel values are replaced by the interpolated values of their non-noise neighboring points. Noise-point information in the space region is acquired from image segmentation based on pixel classification, while noise-point information in the frequency region is derived from redundant wavelet decomposition for the SLM image. Fisher's linear discriminant method is used to yield the two noise-point images. The degraded grain shapes in the SLM images at different noise levels are satisfactorily recovered with a single iteration of smoothing without losses in sharp edges although a single smoothing needed four interpolations. Thus, the present noise-removal technique is shown to be effective for recovering the original shapes of the grains in every SLM image.