Formation of poly(ethylene phosphates) in polycondensation of H3PO4 with ethylene glycol. Kinetic and mechanistic study

Conditions of synthesis of poly(ethylene phosphates) in reaction of H₃PO₄ with HOCH₂CH₂OH (EG), the actual path of polycondensation, and structure of the obtained polymers (mostly oligomers) and kinetics of reaction are described. Preliminary kinetic information, based on the comparison of the MALDI‐TOF‐ms and ³¹P{¹H} NMR spectra as a function of conversion is given as well. Because of the dealkylation process fragments derived from di‐ and triethylene glycols are also present in the repeating units. Structures of the end groups (? CH₂CH₂OH or ? OP(O)(OH)₂) depend on the starting ratio of [EG]₀/[H₃PO₄]₀, although even at the excess of EG the acidic end groups prevail because of the dealkylation process. In MALDI‐TOF‐ms products with P_n equal up to 21 have been observed. The average polymerization degrees (P_n) are lower and have been calculated from the proportion of the end groups. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Polym Sci Part A: Polym Chem 46: 830–843, 2008     

DFT studies on tautomeric preferences. Part 3: Proton transfer in 2-(8-acylquinolin-2-yl)-1,3-diones

8-Acetyl- and 8-benzoyl-2-(quinolin-2-yl) derivatives of 1,3-diketones were studied from point of view of their tautomeric preferences. Effective electron delocalization and strong hydrogen bonds were found to be responsible for high stability of the enaminone form (the most stable tautomer). Density functional theory (DFT) calculations prove that enolimine and ketimine species are less favored. Contribution of the zwitterionic resonance structures to the enaminone form is most significant in 2-(quinolin-2(1H)-ylidene)-2H-indene-1,3-dione derivatives. Formation of the bifurcated hydrogen bonds was found to take place only in 8-acetyl derivatives. One of these bonds is of the RAHB (Resonance Assisted Hydrogen Bond) type. There is a steric interaction of the pyridine β-hydrogen and carbonyl oxygen atoms in the enaminone tautomers.     

Retrieving the heat transfer coefficient for jet impingement from transient temperature measurements

Algorithm of retrieving the heat transfer coefficient (HTC) from transient temperature measurements is presented. The unknown distributions of two types of boundary conditions: the temperature and heat flux are parameterized using a small number of user defined functions. The solutions of the direct heat conduction problems with known boundary temperature and flux are expressed as a superposition of auxiliary temperature fields multiplied by unknown parameters. Inverse problem is formulated as a least squares fit of calculated and measured temperatures and is cast in a form of a sum of two objective functions. The first results originates from an inverse problem for retrieving the boundary temperature the second comes from the inverse problem for reproducing the boundary heat flux. The final form of the objective function is obtained by enforcing constant in time value of the heat transfer coefficient. This approach leads to substantial regularization of the results, when compared with the standard technique, where HTC is calculated from separately reconstructed temperature and heat flux on the boundary. The validation of the numerical procedure is carried out by reconstructing a known distribution of the HTC using simulated measurements laden by stochastic error. The proposed approach is also used to reconstruct the distribution of the HTC in a physical experiment of heating a cylindrical sample using an impinging jet.     

Modeling of particle transport and combustion phenomena in a large-scale circulating fluidized bed boiler using a hybrid Euler-Lagrange approach

The constantly developing fiuidized combustion technology has become competitive with a conventional pulverized coal （PC） combustion. Circulating fluidized bed （CFB） boilers can be a good alternative to PC boilers due to their robustness and lower sensitivity to the fuel quality. However, appropriate engineering tools that can be used to model and optimize the construction and operating parameters of a CFB boiler still require development. This paper presents the application of a relatively novel hybrid Euler-Lagrange approach to model the dense gas-solid flow combined with a combustion process in a large-scale indus- trial CFB boiler. In this work, this complex flow has been resolved by applying the ANSYS FLUENT 14.0 commercial computational fluid dynamics （CFD） code. To accurately resolve the multiphase flow, the original CFD code has been extended by additional user-defined functions. These functions were used to control the boiler mass load, particle recirculation process （simplified boiler geometry）, and interphase hydrodynamic properties. This work was split into two parts. In the first part, which is referred to as pseudo combustion, the combustion process was not directly simulated. Instead, the effect of the chemi- cal reactions was simulated by modifying the density of the continuous phase so that it corresponded to the mean temperature and composition of the flue gases, In this stage, the particle transport was simu- lated using the standard Euler-Euler and novel hybrid Euler-Lagrange approaches, The obtained results were compared against measured data, and both models were compared to each other. In the second part, the numerical model was enhanced by including the chemistry and physics of combustion. To the best of the authors＇ knowledge, the use of the hybrid Euler-Lagrange approach to model combustion is a new engineering application of this model, In this work, the combustion process was modeled for air-fuel combustion. The simulation results were compared with experimental data.     

Comparison of the standard Euler-Euler and hybrid Euler-Lagrange approaches for modeling particle transport in a pilot-scale circulating fluidized bed

Particle transport phenomena in small-scale circulating fiuidized beds （CFB） can be simulated using the Euler-Euler, discrete element method, and Euler-Lagrange approaches. In this work, a hybrid Euler-Lagrange model known as the dense discrete phase model （DDPM）, which has common roots with the multiphase particle-in-cell model, was applied in simulating particle transport within a mid-sized experimental CFB facility. Implementation of the DDPM into the commercial ANSYS Fluent CFD package is relatively young in comparison with the granular Eulerian model. For that reason, validation of the DDPM approach against experimental data is still required and is addressed in this paper. Additional difficulties encountered in modeling fluidization processes are connected with long calculation times. To reduce times, the complete boiler models are simplified to include just the combustion chamber. Such simplifications introduce errors in the predicted solid distribution in the boiler. To investigate the conse- quences of model reduction, simulations were made using the simplified and complete pilot geometries and compared with experimental data. All simulations were performed using the ANSYSFLUENT 14.0 package. A set of user defined functions were used in the hybrid DDPM and Euler-Euler approaches to recirculate solid particles.     

Prediction of protein structure using a knowledge-based off-lattice united-residue force field and global optimization methods

A united-residue model of polypeptide chains developed in our laboratories with united side-chains and united peptide groups as interaction sites is presented. The model is designed to work in continuous space; hence efficient global-optimization methods can be applied. In this work, we adopted the distance-scaling method that is based on continuous deformation of the original rugged energy hypersurface to obtain a smoothed surface. The method has been applied successfully to predict the structures of simple motifs, such as the three-helix bundle structure of the 10-58 fragment of staphylococcal protein A in de novo folding simulations and more complicated motifs in inverse-folding simulations. Received: 24 April 1998 / Accepted: 4 August 1998 / Published online: 2 November 1998     

Noncommutative scalar solitons: existence and nonexistence

We study the variational equations for solitons in noncommutative scalar field theories in an even number of spatial dimensions. We prove the existence of spherically symmetric solutions for a sufficiently large noncommutativity parameter θ and we prove the absence of spherically symmetric solutions for small θ.