Investigation of sulfonated poly(ether ether ketone sulfone)/heteropolyacid composite membranes for high temperature fuel cell applications

The sulfonated poly(ether ether ketone sulfone) (SPEEKS)/heteropolyacid (HPA) composite membranes with different HPA content in SPEEKS copolymers matrix with different degree of sulfonation (DS) were investigated for high temperature proton exchange membrane fuel cells. Composite membranes were characterized by Fourier transfer infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). FTIR band shifts suggested that the sulfonic acid groups on the copolymer backbone strongly interact with HPA particles. SEM pictures showed that the HPA particles were uniformly distributed throughout the SPEEKS membranes matrix and particle sizes decreased with the increment of copolymers' DS. The holes were not found in SPEEKS‐4/HPA30 (consisting of 70% SPEEKS copolymers with DS = 0.8 and 30% HPA) composite membrane after composite membranes were treated with boiling water for 24 h. Thermal stabilities of the composite membranes were better than those of pure sulfonated copolymers membranes. Although the composite membranes possessed lower water uptake, it exhibited higher proton conductivity for SPEEKS‐4/HPA30 especially at high temperature (above 100 °C). Its proton conductivity linearly increased from 0.068 S/cm at 25 °C to 0.095 S/cm at 120 °C, which was higher than 0.06 S/cm of Nafion 117. In contrast, proton conductivity of pure SPEEKS‐4 membrane only increased from 0.062 S/cm at 25 °C to 0.078 S/cm at 80 °C. At 120 °C, proton conductivity decreased to poor 0.073 S/cm. The result indicated that composite membranes exhibited high proton conductivity at high temperature. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Polym Sci Part B: Polym Phys 44: 1967–1978, 2006     

Independence of the brittle–ductile transition from the rubber particle size for impact‐modified poly(vinyl chloride)

A series of acrylic impact modifiers (AIMs) with different particle sizes ranging from 55.2 to 927.0 nm were synthesized by seeded emulsion polymerization, and the effect of the particle size on the brittle–ductile transition of impact‐modified poly(vinyl chloride) (PVC) was investigated. For each AIM, a series of PVC/AIM blends with compositions of 6, 8, 10, 12, and 15 phr AIM in 100 phr PVC were prepared, and the Izod impact strengths of these blends were tested at 23 °C. For AIMs with particle sizes of 55.2, 59.8, 125.2, 243.2, and 341.1 nm, the blends fractured in the brittle mode when the concentration of AIM was lower than 10 phr, whereas the blends showed ductile fracture when the AIM concentration reached 10 phr. It was concluded that the brittle–ductile transition of the PVC/AIM blends was independent of the particle size in the range of 55.2–341.1 nm. When the particle size was greater than 341.1 nm, however, the brittle–ductile transition shifted to a higher AIM concentration with an increase in the particle size. Furthermore, the critical interparticle distance was found not to be the criterion of the brittle–ductile transition for the PVC/AIM blends. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Polym Sci Part B: Polym Phys 44: 696–702, 2006     

Chiral separation of synthetic vicinal diol compounds by capillary zone electrophoresis with borate buffer and beta-cyclodextrin as buffer additive.

The investigation on capillary electrophoretic enantioseparation of six synthetic compounds containing vicinal diol groups has been undertaken to acquire the optimum conditions using native beta-cyclodextrin (beta-CD) as chiral selector and borate as a background electrolyte. The separation was carried out in an uncoated capillary (58.5 cm x 75 microm i.d., effective length 48.5 cm) and the effects of several important factors were investigated in detail. The results showed that beta-CD as a chiral selector exhibited good enantioselectivity and that the enantioseparation was greatly influenced by the structure of the diols, the borate concentration and the buffer pH. The optimum performance was obtained for the chiral vicinal diols under the conditions of 200 mM borate buffer of pH 9.8 containing 1.7% beta-CD at an applied voltage of 15 kV and a capillary temperature of 20 degrees C. Under the conditions, four diols were baseline separated with fast analysis time and the good theoretical plate numbers (above 10 x 10(4)) and favorable migration-time reproducibilities (RSDs below 3.0%) were obtained. The separation results were satisfactory.     

Determination of 17 kinds of banned organochlorine pesticides in water by activated carbon fiber-solid phase microextraction coupled with GC-MS.

Activated carbon fiber (ACF) as extraction fiber for solid-phase microextraction (SPME) and its application for the analysis of banned organochlorine pesticides (OCPs) were investigated. Firstly, ACF was activated by different concentration of zinc chloride, which indicated that ACF activated by 60% zinc chloride had a reasonable specific surface area, pore volume and pore distribution. Secondly, the parameters for the ACF-SPME procedure, the adsorption and desorption conditions, were also optimized when coupled with gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS). Thirdly, the ACF-SPME was used to analyze 17 kinds of OCPs in water. The linearity of most pesticides was found to be between 0.2 and 50 microg/l with GC-MS under the selected ion monitoring (SIM) acquisition mode. The limits of detection (LOD) at the sub microg/l were obtained. The work demonstrated here shows that ACF is a promising alternative for the SPME procedure.     

Positive Steady States of a Prey-predator Model with Diffusion and Non-monotone Conversion Rate

In this paper, we study the positive steady states of a prey-predator model with diffusion throughout and a non-monotone conversion rate under the homogeneous Dirichlet boundary condition. We obtain some results of the existence and non-existence of positive steady states. The stability and uniqueness of positive steady states are also discussed.     

Locally symmetric positively curved Finsler spaces

We showed that any compact locally symmetric Finsler metric with positive flag curvature must be Riemannian. Dedicated to Professor Karsten Grove on the occassion of his sixtieth birthday Received: 8 May 2006     

On the sheaf of extendible ideals of topological algebras

In this paper a new sheaf for topological algebras, called the sheaf of extendible ideals, is introduced. It is shown that the sheaf space of this sheaf is uniformizable but not complete in general. The research of both of the authors was supported by Estonian Science Foundation grant 6205.     

Theory and Application of Characteristic Finite Element Domain Decomposition Procedures for Coupled System of Dynamics of Fluids in Porous Media

For a coupled system of multiplayer dynamics of fluids in porous media,the characteristic finiteelement domain decomposition procedures applicable to parallel arithmetic are put forward.Techniques suchas calculus of variations,domain decomposition,characteristic method,negative norm estimate,energy methodand the theory of prior estimates are adopted.Optimal order estimates in L~2 norm are derived for the error inthe approximate solution.     

Reformulation of the support set selection problem in the logical analysis of data

The paper is concerned with the problem of binary classification of data records, given an already classified training set of records. Among the various approaches to the problem, the methodology of the logical analysis of data (LAD) is considered. Such approach is based on discrete mathematics, with special emphasis on Boolean functions. With respect to the standard LAD procedure, enhancements based on probability considerations are presented. In particular, the problem of the selection of the optimal support set is formulated as a weighted set covering problem. Testable statistical hypothesis are used. Accuracy of the modified LAD procedure is compared to that of the standard LAD procedure on datasets of the UCI repository. Encouraging results are obtained and discussed.     

On the growth type of entire monogenic functions

In this paper we establish an explicit relation between the growth type of general entire solutions to the generalized Cauchy-Riemann system in \mathbbRⁿ⁺¹{\mathbb{R}^{n+1}} and their Taylor coefficients. This formula then enables us to compute the growth type of some higher dimensional generalizations of the trigonometric and special functions that are null-solutions to this system.