Facile Catalyzed Preparation of 14‐Aryl‐ or Alkyl‐14‐H‐dibenzo[a,j]xanthenes by Dodecylphosphonic Acid and Dodecylsulfamic Acid: Environmentally Benign Methods

Under mild‐ and solvent‐free conditions, one‐pot preparation of 14‐alkyl‐ or 14‐aryl‐14‐H‐dibenzo[a,j]xanthenes could proceed in the presence of catalytic amounts of dodecylphosphonic acid (DPA) and dodecylsulfamic acid (DSA) in good to excellent yields. In these reactions, DPA and DSA are recovered by straightforward work‐ups.     

New nanocomposites containing metal nanoparticles, carbon nanotube and polymer

Metal-carbon nanotube-graft-polymer (MCNT-g-P) nanocomposites were synthesized and characterized successfully. In this work, multiwall carbon nanotubes (MWCNT) were opened using HNO₃/H₂SO₄ mixture and filled by metal nanoparticles such as silver nanoparticles through wet chemistry method. Then MWCNT containing metal nanoparticles were used as macroinitiator for ring opening polymerization of ε-caprolactone and MCNT-g-P nanocomposites were obtained. Length of grafted polymer arms onto the MWCNT was controlled using MWCNT/ε-caprolactone ratio. Structure and properties of nanocomposites were evaluated by TEM, DSC, TGA, and spectroscopy methods.     

A phase regulated back wave propagation technique for geoacoustic inversion

An inversion method based on the concept of back wave propagation (BWP) is described in this paper for estimation of geoacoustic parameters from acoustic field data. A phase-regulation technique is introduced to increase the sensitivity of the method for geoacoustic model parameters having low sensitivity. The case of data consisting of signal plus additive noise is also addressed. It is shown theoretically that the sensitivity can be increased by a factor alpha using the phase regulation procedure, and that the spatial resolution of signal energy that is concentrated by BWP at the known source position is increased when a increases. This result suggests an effective criterion for use in the inversion, based on the spatial distribution of signal energy around the true source location. The basis for the criterion is the spatial variance of the back-propagated pressure field in a window around the known source location. A multistep search process is proposed to avoid using a complicated multidimensional search process. Inversion results from both simulations and experimental data are given. The real data were taken from the Pacific Shelf experiment carried out in shallow water off the West Coast of Vancouver Island in the Northeast Pacific Ocean.     

Calculation of the Baer-invariant of certain groups

The present paper is devoted to calculation of the Baer-invariants of the dihedral and the quaternion groups of order 8, and also a certain class ofp-groups with respect to the variety of nilpotent groups.     

Scheduling in network flow shops

We consider the general problem of static scheduling of a set of jobs in a network flow shop. In network flow shops, the scheduler not only has to sequence and schedule but also must concurrently determine the process routing of the jobs through the shop. In this paper, we establish the computational complexity of this new class of scheduling problem and propose a general purpose heuristic procedure. The performance of the heuristic is analyzed when makespan, cycle time and average flow time are the desired objectives.This research has been supported by the UCLA Academic Senate Grant #95.     

Localization of elastic waves in heterogeneous media with off-diagonal disorder and long-range correlations

Using the Martin-Siggia-Rose method, we study propagation of acoustic waves in strongly heterogeneous media which are characterized by a broad distribution of the elastic constants. Gaussian-white distributed elastic constants, as well as those with long-range correlations with nondecaying power-law correlation functions, are considered. The study is motivated in part by a recent discovery that the elastic moduli of rock at large length scales may be characterized by long-range power-law correlation functions. Depending on the disorder, the renormalization group (RG) flows exhibit a transition to localized regime in any dimension. We have numerically checked the RG results using the transfer-matrix method and direct numerical simulations for one- and two-dimensional systems, respectively.