Local Estimates for Minimizers of Some Convex Integral Functional of the Gradient and the Strong Maximum Principle

We consider a class of convex integral functionals with lagrangeans depending only on the gradient and satisfying a generalized symmetry assumption, which includes as a particular case the rotational symmetry. Adapting the method by A. Cellina we obtain a kind of local estimates for minimizers in the respective variational problems, which is applied then to deduce some versions of the Strong Maximum Principle in the variational setting.     

Tails of waiting times and their bounds

Tails of distributions having the form of the geometric convolution are considered. In the case of light-tailed summands, a simple proof of the famous Cramér asymptotic formula is given via the change of probability measure. Some related results are obtained, namely, bounds of the tails of geometric convolutions, expressions for the distribution of the 1st failure time and failure rate in regenerative systems, and others. In the case of heavy-tailed summands, two-sided bounds of the tail of the geometric convolution are given in the cases where the summands have either Pareto or Weibull distributions. The results obtained have the property that the corresponding lower and upper bounds are tailed-equivalent. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Correlation between Adsorption and Solid-Phase Interaction of Fullerene C60 with Carbohydrates

JPC – Journal of Planar Chromatography – Modern TLC - The chromatographic behavior of fullerene C60 has been studied on silica gel layers impregnated with solutions of glucose, sucrose,...     

Studies on crude oil‐water biphasic mixtures by low‐field NMR

Low‐field ¹H NMR was used in this work for the analysis of mixtures involving crude oils and water. CPMG experiments were performed to determine the transverse relaxation time (T₂) distribution curves, which were computed by the inverse Laplace transform of the echo decay data. The instrument's ability of quantifying water and petroleum in biphasic mixtures following different methodologies was tested. For mixtures between deionized water and petroleum, one achieved excellent results, with root mean squared error of cross‐validation (RMSECV) of 0.8% for a regression between the water content (wt %) and the relative area of the water peak in the T₂ distribution curve, or a standard deviation of 0.9% for the relationship between the water content and the relative water peak area, corrected by the relative hydrogen index of the crude. In the case of biphasic mixtures of Mn²⁺‐doped water and crude oils, the best result of RMSECV = 1.6% was achieved by using the raw magnetization decay data for a partial least squares regression. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

GPU computing for shallow water flow simulation based on finite volume schemes

This article is a review of the work that we are carrying out to efficiently simulate shallow water flows. In this paper, we focus on the efficient implementation of path-conservative Roe type high-order finite volume schemes to simulate shallow flows that are supposed to be governed by the one-layer or two-layer shallow water systems, formulated under the form of a conservation law with source terms. The implementation of the scheme is carried out on Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), thus achieving a substantial improvement of the speedup with respect to normal CPUs. Finally, some numerical experiments are presented.     

Thermal and structural characterization of SrTi1-xNdxO3

Sr(Ti,Nd)O₃ was synthesized in order to evaluate the influence of the amount of neodymium on the thermal and structural properties of SrTiO₃. The synthesis was carried out using the polymeric precursor method. A small mass gain was observed for the SrTiO₃ and SrTi_0.98Nd_0.02O₃ samples accompanied by an exothermic peak in the DTA curves. Other steps at higher temperatures are assigned to the combustion of the organic material and carbonate. Elimination of defects by previous calcination of the precursors is responsible by the short and long range ordering of the perovskite. Cubic phase was obtained for undoped and doped SrTiO₃.     

The 2-concavification of a Banach lattice equals the diagonal of the Fremlin tensor square

We investigate the relationship between the diagonal of the Fremlin projective tensor product of a Banach lattice E with itself and the 2-concavification of E.