A lipase catalyzed condensation reaction with a tricyclic diketone: yet another example of biocatalytic promiscuity

Novozym 435 (a commercially available immobilized form of Candida antarctica lipase B) was found to catalyze a condensation reaction of 5-hydroxy-endo-tricyclo[5.2.1.0^2,6]deca-4,8-dien-3-one with acetaldehyde (enzymatically produced from vinyl acetate in situ) under low water conditions, in presence of 10% organic co-solvent (N,N-dimethyl formamide or pyridine), to form a bis-adduct. Even though the condensation reaction occurred with pyridine (acting as a base catalyst) in the presence of acetaldehyde and in the absence of enzyme, the reaction was very slow as compared to the enzymatic process. Thus, while the non-enzymatic process took 4 days to achieve 100% conversion; in presence of enzyme it was possible within 4 h.     

Rapid determination of rifaximin in rat serum and urine by direct injection on to a shielded hydrophobic stationary phase by HPLC

A simple and rapid reversed‐phase HPLC method for determination of rifaximin in rat serum and urine was developed. Separation of rifaximin from biological matrix was achieved by direct injection of rat serum and urine onto a restricted‐access medium, Supelco LC‐Hisep, a shielded hydrophobic stationary phase, using acetonitrile:water:acetic acid (18:82:0.1 v/v/v) as a mobile phase. The linear range was 0.10–20 µg/mL (r² > 0.999, n = 6), intraday and interday variation was <6.10%. The limits of detection and quantification were 0.03 (signal‐to‐noise ratio >3) and 0.10 µg/mL (signal‐to‐noise ratio >10), respectively. The method was successfully applied to pharmacokinetic studies of rifaximin after an oral administration to rats. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

On the foundations of thermal radiation inside refractive media

In the effective geometry approach, the electromagnetic field experiences matter as a Gordon spacetime, which causes the appearing properties of light quanta to be modified. For problems involving time and space variations of the refractive index, we discuss and derive, in the geometrical optics limit, radiative transfer theory as a kinetic theory for photons in the Gordon spacetime.     

Luminance contrast, a new illumination technique in light microscopy: Optical basics, practical evaluations, further developments

Luminance contrast is a new illumination technique in light microscopy recently developed by the author, which leads to extraordinary contrast effects, enhanced focal depth and supramicroscopic resolution when transparent stained or unstained specimens are examined.This method is characterized by a small illuminating light beam running centrically to the specimen, so that the specimen is illuminated very homogenously. Within the objective, the illuminating beam is blocked by a small light stop. When all parts of the illuminating light are totally blocked, the background is completely dark; when small parts of the illuminating light pass the light stop, the background is moderately brightened.The microscopic image is a result of scattered light components, which are bent or reflected by the specimen. When the illuminating light is not completely blocked by the light stop, the transmitted illuminating components interfere with the scattered light components coming from the specimen.Additional three-dimensional effects are achievable when the illuminating light passes the specimen obliquely.The resulting variants of illumination are similar to dark field, negative phase contrast and interference contrast. In all modes of luminance contrast the specimen is illuminated very homogenously so that it appears as a self-luminous, fluorescent body – similar to fluorescence microscopy.Luminance contrast can be carried out when mirror objectives are used or common objectives containing glass lenses are equipped with individually adjusted light stops.Further aspects of technical developments are discussed in full details.     

On existence and uniqueness for a coupled system modeling immiscible flow through a porous medium

We consider a system of nonlinear coupled partial differential equations that models immiscible two-phase flow through a porous medium. A primary difficulty with this problem is its degenerate nature. Under reasonable assumptions on the data, and for appropriate boundary and initial conditions, we prove the existence of a weak solution to the problem, in a certain sense, using a compactness argument. This is accomplished by regularizing the problem and proving that the regularized problem has a unique solution which is bounded independently of the regularization parameter. We also establish a priori estimates for uniqueness of a solution.     

Numerical simulations in granular matter: The discharge of a 2D silo

In this paper I give a short and elementary review of numerical simulations in granular assemblies, giving the process of discharge of a 2D silo as an example. The strengths and limitations of different approaches are discussed, together with some comments on the specific issues related to the numerics of discontinuous dissipative collisions.      

Numerical Prediction of Two-Phase Flow through a Tube Bundle Based on Reduced-Order Model and a Void Fraction Correlation

Predicting the void fraction of a two-phase flow outside of tubes is essential to evaluate the thermohydraulic behaviour in steam generators. Indeed, it determines two-phase mixture properties and affects two-phase mixture velocity, which enable evaluating the pressure drop of the system. The two-fluid model for the numerical simulation of two-phase flows requires interaction laws between phases which are not known and/or reliable for a flow within a tube bundle. Therefore, the mixture model, for which it is easier to implement suitable correlations for tube bundles, is used. Indeed, by expressing the relative velocity as a function of slip, the void fraction model of Feenstra et al. and Hibiki et al. developed for upward cross-flow through horizontal tube bundles is introduced and compared. With the method suggested in this paper, the physical phenomena that occur in tube bundles are taken into consideration. Moreover, the tube bundle is modelled using a porous media approach where the Darcy–Forchheimer term is usually defined by correlations found in the literature. However, for some tube bundle geometries, these correlations are not available. The second goal of the paper is to quickly compute, in quasi-real-time, this term by a non-intrusive parametric reduced model based on Proper Orthogonal Decomposition. This method, named Bi-CITSGM (Bi-Calibrated Interpolation on the Tangent Subspace of the Grassmann Manifold), consists in interpolating the spatial and temporal bases by ITSGM (Interpolation on the Tangent Subspace of the Grassmann Manifold) in order to define the solution for a new parameter. The two developed methods are validated based on the experimental results obtained by Dowlati et al. for a two-phase cross-flow through a horizontal tube bundle.     

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多孔介质的变形表现为黏弹塑性,其中,弹性变形体现为本体变形;黏性变 形体现为结构变形;塑性变形体现为损伤变形. 在原有有效应力理论的基础上结合损伤力学 的基本原理,研究多孔介质有效应力的性质. 在原假设多孔介质颗粒可压缩的前提下,假定 部分颗粒可发生局部破坏,并且在颗粒破坏后,有效应力将有所增加,相应的骨架承载能力 将有微小程度增强. 采用损伤有效应力参与计算将能更加准确地描述多孔介质复杂的变形性 质.     

A Multiple Salient Features-Based User Identification across Social Media

Identifying users across social media has practical applications in many research areas, such as user behavior prediction, commercial recommendation systems, and information retrieval. In this paper, we propose a multiple salient features-based user identification across social media (MSF-UI), which extracts and fuses the rich redundant features contained in user display name, network topology, and published content. According to the differences between users’ different features, a multi-module calculation method is used to obtain the similarity between various redundant features. Finally, the bidirectional stable marriage matching algorithm is used for user identification across social media. Experimental results show that: (1) Compared with single-attribute features, the multi-dimensional information generated by users is integrated to optimize the universality of user identification; (2) Compared with baseline methods such as ranking-based cross-matching (RCM) and random forest confirmation algorithm based on stable marriage matching (RFCA-SMM), this method can effectively improve precision rate, recall rate, and comprehensive evaluation index (F1).     

高阶色散介质的改进移位算子时域有限差分方法

提出一种适用于高阶Debye,Drude,Lorentz及其混合模型的改进移位算子的时域有限差分(SO-FDTD)方法。从介质极化率函数出发,将其写成一阶或二阶有理分式求和的形式,并在随时间步推进计算的过程中,通过引入中间变量和设置临时变量,克服了常规SO-FDTD将高阶模型直接转化为有理分式所导致的计算复杂性和内存占用量大的问题。同时,改进SO-FDTD方法的时域推进计算步骤具有通用性,克服了常规递归卷积(RC-FDTD)方法对各种高阶模型具有不同计算公式,因而不能形成通用计算程序的问题。最后,通过空气-高阶色散介质界面的反射系数计算验证了算法的有效性和通用性。