Photothermal techniques applied to the determination of the water vapor diffusion coefficient and thermal diffusivity of edible films.

Water vapor diffusion coefficient (WVDC) and thermal diffusivity (alpha) were determined in gelatin-starch films through photothermal techniques. The effect of different variables in the elaboration of these films, such as starch and glycerol concentrations and pH, were evaluated through the response surface methodology. The results indicated that an increase in the glycerol concentration and pH favored the WVDC of the films. On the other hand, alpha was influenced principally by the starch content and pH of the film-forming solution. The minimum alpha value was 4.5 x 10(-4) cm2/s, which is compared with alpha values reported for commercial synthetic polymers.     

Ethylene/1‐hexene copolymerization with tetramethyldisiloxane‐bridged bis(indenyl) metallocenes

Ethylene/1‐hexene copolymerizations with disiloxane‐bridged metallocenes, rac‐ and meso‐1,1,3,3‐tetramethyldisiloxanediyl‐bis(1‐indenyl)zirconium dichloride (rac‐ 1 , meso‐ 1 ) activated by modified methylaluminoxane were performed to investigate the influence of conformational dynamics on comonomer selectivity. Although ¹H NOESY (nuclear Overhauser and exchange spectroscopy) analysis indicated that the most stable conformation for the meso isomer in solution was that in which both indenes project over the metal coordination site, this isomer showed higher 1‐hexene selectivity in copolymerization (r_e = 140 ± 30, r_h = 0.024 ± 0.004) than the rac isomer with only one indene over the coordination site (r_e = 240 ± 20, r_h = 0.005 ± 0.001). The meso isomer showed high 1‐hexene selectivity, a high product of reactivity ratios (r_er_h = 3.3 ± 0.5) and produced copolymers that could be separated into fractions with different ethylene content suggesting that the active species exhibited multisite behavior and populated conformations with different comonomer selectivities during the copolymerization. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Polym Sci Part A: Polym Chem 42: 3323–3331, 2004     

Algorithms of motion planning for a six-legged walking machine

This paper investigates algorithms of motion planning for a six-legged walking machine over complex terrain. Application of the Rodrigues-Hamilton parameters for describing the orientation of the body enables one to develop algorithms of motion planning for the body and legs in an absolute coordinate frame with automatic adaptation to the surface. Experiments with a laboratory scale walking machine have demonstrated the efficiency of proposed algorithms. __________ Translated from Fundamentalnaya i Prikladnaya Matematika, Vol. 11, No. 7, pp. 197–206, 2005.     

Variation of the temperature factor of models on a ballistic range

A technique for variation of the temperature factor of free-flight models by varying their initial temperature is described. An experiment on a ballistic range is carried out with a free-flying supersonic blunt cone with a half-angle of 15° at a Mach number of 2.3. The flow at the cone base is studied in the transition range (from the laminar to turbulent flow) of Reynolds numbers. The base flow pattern is determined from the shadowgraphs of the flow about the models. The drag coefficient of the blunt cone at a zero angle of attack is found by processing trajectory data. It is found that the near wake geometries and the drag coefficients of the models tested at the laboratory temperature and a temperature of 120 K differ. Explanations of this effect are given.     

Differentiation of species of the Baccharis genus by HPLC and chemometric methods.

Phytochemical investigation of the aerial parts of three Baccharis species (Asteraceae family) was performed using HPLC and chemometric methods, with the objective of distinguishing between three morphologically very similar species: Baccharis genistelloides Persoon var. trimera (Less.) DC, B. milleflora (Less.) DC and B. articulata (Lam.) Persoon. With the help of Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and variance weights, it was possible to characterize the chromatographic profiles of the alcoholic extracts of the three species. Application of Soft Independent Modeling of Class Analogy (SIMCA) and K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) methods on a training set of 74 extracts resulted in models that correctly classified all eight samples in an independent test set.