An electrostatic precipitator system for the Martian environment

Human exploration missions to Mars will require the development of technologies for the utilization of the planet's own resources for the production of commodities. However, the Martian atmosphere contains large amounts of dust. The extraction of commodities from this atmosphere requires prior removal of this dust. We report on our development of an electrostatic precipitator able to collect Martian simulated dust particles in atmospheric conditions approaching those of Mars. Extensive experiments with an initial prototype in a simulated Martian atmosphere showed efficiencies of 99%. The design of a second prototype with aerosolized Martian simulated dust in a flow-through is described.     

Column-switching high-performance liquid chromatographic detection of pholcodine and its metabolites in urine with fluorescence and electrochemical detection.

A sensitive and selective method for the detection of pholcodine and its metabolite morphine in urine using high-performance liquid chromatography is described. It involves on-line clean-up of urine on a trace enrichment column packed with a polymeric strong cation-exchange material. Pholcodine and its metabolites were separated on two analytical columns with different selectivities. Pholcodine was detected by a fluorescence detector and morphine was detected electrochemically. One system, based on reversed-phase chromatography, applied a polystyrene-divinylbenzene column and gradient elution. The other system was based on normal-phase chromatography with a silica column and isocratic elution. Morphine was confirmed to be a metabolite of pholcodine by reversed-phase chromatography and electrochemical detection. Two unidentified metabolites of pholcodine were separated from pholcodine by normal-phase chromatography and detected by fluorescence detection.     

Cholesky decomposition of the two-electron integral matrix in electronic structure calculations

A standard Cholesky decomposition of the two-electron integral matrix leads to integral tables which have a huge number of very small elements. By neglecting these small elements, it is demonstrated that the recursive part of the Cholesky algorithm is no longer a bottleneck in the procedure. It is shown that a very efficient algorithm can be constructed when family type basis sets are adopted. For subsequent calculations, it is argued that two-electron integrals represented by Cholesky integral tables have the same potential for simplifications as density fitting. Compared to density fitting, a Cholesky decomposition of the two-electron matrix is not subjected to the problem of defining an auxiliary basis for obtaining a fixed accuracy in a calculation since the accuracy simply derives from the choice of a threshold for the decomposition procedure. A particularly robust algorithm for solving the restricted Hartree-Fock (RHF) equations can be speeded up if one has access to an ordered set of integral tables. In a test calculation on a linear chain of beryllium atoms, the advocated RHF algorithm nicely converged, but where the standard direct inversion in iterative space method converged very slowly to an excited state.