Lyotropic mixture made of potassium laurate/1-undecanol/K2SO4/water presenting high birefringences and large biaxial nematic phase domain: a laser conoscopy study

The lyotropic liquid crystalline quaternary mixture made of potassium laurate (KL), potassium sulphate, 1-undecanol and water was investigated by experimental optical methods (optical microscopy and laser conoscopy). In a particular temperature and relative concentrations range, the three nematic phases (two uniaxial and one biaxial) were identified. The biaxial domain in the temperature/KL concentration surface is larger when compared to other lyotropic mixtures. Moreover, this new mixture gives nematic phases with higher birefringence than similar systems. The behavior of the symmetric tensor order parameter invariants σ (3) and σ (2) calculated from the measured optical birefringences supports that the uniaxial-to-biaxial transitions are of second order, described by a mean-field theory.     

Coatings with self-cleaning properties

The issue of self-cleaning significantly gained popularity due to the work of Barthlott and coworkers on the so called “Lotos-Effect^®”. They found out, that the cleanliness of the Lotos leaves originates from a combined effect of surface topography and hydrophobicity. The symbol of the beautiful Lotos flower as well as the fascination of surfaces being cleaned without any manual activity, simply by a rain shower, has since then stimulated the fantasy of many researchers. Our vision is to copy this mechanism from mother nature and to implement it into coating systems in such a way, that conventional application techniques, e.g. spray-coating, can be applied without the necessity of further process steps like e.g. soft lithography. Three different approaches will be presented in this paper. Roughness and contact angle measurements have been used to quantify the self-cleaning properties.     

The Newton-Kleinman method for the optimal control of stable weakly regular linear systems

We give an algorithm to find the approximate solution of the linear-quadratic optimal control problem for stable weakly regular linear systems. This algorithm can be understood as a generalization of the Newton-Kleinman method known from the finite-dimensional theory. The central characteristic of our approach is the possibility to solve problems with unbounded control and observation operators, which is motivated by partial differential equations with boundary control and observation. (© 2016 Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)     

Comparing near infrared and Raman spectroscopy for on-line monitoring of emulsion copolymerization reactions

In this work, Raman and Near InfraRed (NIR) spectroscopies are evaluated for the monitoring of different semicontinuous emulsion homo- and co-polymerization reactions. Important process variables, namely monomer concentrations and average particle sizes, were monitored by both techniques under realistic conditions that would be found in an industrial environment (e.g. low signal/noise ratio, probe placed in the reaction medium). Results suggest that Raman and NIR are suitable for on-line monitoring of emulsion polymerization reactions and that the success of their application is mainly related to representative calibration models used for the estimation of the properties of interest.     

Balancing Transformations for Infinite-Dimensional Control Systems

In order to facilitate model reduction by balanced truncation, we introduce state space transformations that can be used to construct an ℓ₂-balanced realization of a regular, linear input-ouput map with nuclear Hankel-operator directly from the system generators of an arbitrary, given realization. These balancing transformations are based on factors of the Gramians and, for infinite-dimensional systems, they are usually unbounded operators. Subsequently the ℓ₂-balanced realization can be truncated in a non-trivial way to obtain an approximating, finite-dimensional model. (© 2013 Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)