Applicability of cubic equation of state mixing rules on correlation of excess molar volume of Non-Electrolyte binary mixtures

The excess molar volume V ^E data of the binary liquid systems were correlated by the Peng–Robinson–Stryjek–Vera equation of state coupled with two different types of mixing rules: composition dependent van der Waals mixing rule (vdW) and the mixing rule based on the Gupta–Rasmussen–Fredenslund method (GRF), with the NRTL equation as G ^E model. The results obtained by these models show that type of applied mixing rule, a number and position of interaction parameters are of great importance for a satisfactory correlation of V ^E data. The GRF mixing rules coupled with the NRTL model gave mostly satisfactory results for V ^E correlation of the nonideal binary systems of diverse complexity.     

Asensitive,Selective, and Rapid Colorimetric Method to Determine Cyanide Contamination in Containers,Capsules, and Liquids

Abstract

A new formulation of the Konig colorimetric method for cyanide is selective, has increased stability, and is sensitive to a few ppb. The formulation can be placed as a strip on the safety seals of bottles to indicate tampering, placed in a syringe and used to sample head space gas in commercial products or liquids to test for tampering, or placed in the desiccant container in bottles of capsules or tablets. Reaction with head space gas requires just a few seconds, and less than an hour is required if the cyanide must first permeate through capsules. Liquids also can be either drawn directly into the syringe, or the cyanide evolved by adding an Alka-seltzer tablet to purge the gas. Reactions are immediate. Hydrogen sulfide and ammonia which interfere with several other cyanide tests, do not interfere with this formulation. A mixture of N-chlorosuccinimide and succinimide oxidizes CN^- to CN⁺. The cyanogen ion selectively reacts with 4-phenylpyridine to form a dialdehyde, which is then coupled with either barbituric acid (red rapidly turning to blue) or 3-methyl-l-phenyl-2-pyrazolin-5-one (purple slowly turning to green black).     

Differentiation of Cultivars of Flos Chrysanthemum with the Use of High-Performance Liquid Chromatography Fingerprints and Chemometrics

Flos Chrysanthemum is a generic name for a particular group of edible plants, which also have medicinal properties. There are, in fact, twenty to thirty different cultivars, which are commonly used in beverages and for medicinal purposes. In this work, four Flos Chrysanthemum cultivars, Hangju, Taiju, Gongju, and Boju, were collected and chromatographic fingerprints were used to distinguish and assess these cultivars for quality control purposes. Chromatography fingerprints contain chemical information but also often have baseline drifts and peak shifts, which complicate data processing, and adaptive iteratively reweighted, penalized least squares, and correlation optimized warping were applied to correct the fingerprint peaks. The adjusted data were submitted to unsupervised and supervised pattern recognition methods. Principal component analysis was used to qualitatively differentiate the Flos Chrysanthemum cultivars. Partial least squares, continuum power regression, and K-nearest neighbors were used to predict the unknown samples. Finally, the elliptic joint confidence region method was used to evaluate the prediction ability of these models. The partial least squares and continuum power regression methods were shown to best represent the experimental results.     

A Study of Two Atomic Absorption Methods for the Determination of Sub-Microgram Amounts of Arsenic and Selenium

Abstract

Two atomic absorption accessory units were studied for the determination of arsenic and selenium in waters. One involves a flame mode while the other a flameless mode. Each was analyzed for requirements in speed per analyses, sample sizes required, potential interferences, coefficients of variation, and in overall ease in use.

Although the flameless mode could determine lower levels of arsenic and selenium than the flame mode, it was hampered by some severe interferences. Advantages of these accessories in their use over conventional wet chemical methods included: speed per analysis, elimination of time-consuming concentration steps, and elimination of using fragile equipment and noxious solvents.     

Static heterogeneity in metallic glasses and its correlation to physical properties

Glasses exhibit intriguing physical and mechanical properties resulting from their structure. We have investigated metal-glass dynamics using inelastic X-ray scattering and ultrasonic techniques for several Pd-, Pt-, and Zr-based glasses with varying fragility. In some cases we have observed a faster phase velocity at short wavelengths than long wavelengths, or positive dispersion. Here we apply elastic wave scattering theory to suggest that the behavior of acoustic phonons can be understood by considering the presence of intrinsic nanoscale elastic inhomogeneity with a certain correlation length, i.e., “static heterogeneity”. Furthermore, we suggest that such an elastic inhomogeneity could be the origin of many of the interesting physical and mechanical properties of metallic glasses.     

Variation of Excitation Spectra in Mixed-Stack Charge-Transfer Complexes

Local excitation spectra in different spin and charge channels are calculated in the one-dimensional extended Hubbard model with alternating energy levels at half filling for mixed-stack charge-transfer complexes. Near the boundary between the neutral and ionic phases, the electronic system is easily distorted by an additional term that reduces the symmetry and opens a gap. Alternating transfer integrals produce a nonmagnetic spin-Peierls phase; while staggered magnetic fields produce an antiferromagnetic phase. Both of them enhance the ionicity when they are introduced into the neutral phase near the boundary. Accordingly, these additional terms enhance low-energy spin excitations, although these excitations are suppressed when compared with those in the regular ionic phase. The regular ionic phase has a larger spectral weight in the local current channel than the neutral phase. This would imply that, in one dimension and if the lattice effect is negligible, the ionic phase has smaller activation energy in the electric conductivity near the boundary than the neutral phase.     

Reliability of passive fiber-optic interconnects

In this paper, recent efforts to characterize the reliability of passive fiber-optic interconnection components, such as single-mode connectors, fused-tapered couplers, and wavelength-division multiplexers, are reviewed. These components, having been tested under a variety of mechanical and environmental conditions, showed no degradation in optical or mechanical performance.     

Electrical capacitance of dielectric coated metallic parallelepiped and closed cylinder isolated in free space

This paper presents a method for the evaluation of the capacitance and the charge distribution of a dielectric coated metallic parallelepiped and a dielectric coated metallic hollow cylinder with the top and bottom cover plates using the method of moments (MoM) based on the pulse basis function and the point matching. Boundary conditions for the potential on the conductor surfaces and continuity of the normal component of the displacement density at the dielectric-free space interface is used to generate two integral equations. Two sets of simultaneous equations are formed from the two integral equations using the MoM. The total charge on the conductor surface is found from the solution for the set of simultaneous equations. The validity of the analysis has been justified by comparing the data on the capacitance available in the literature for metallic cube and hollow cylinder with top and bottom cover plates with the data on capacitance, computed by the present method for similar structures considering a very low dielectric constant as well as a very thin dielectric coating.     

A mechanism leading to q-power law distribution due to the inhomogeneity of phase space in the self-gravitational system

One mechanism leading to the q-power law distribution has been proposed in the self-gravitational system. The friction force in the stochastic process may be nonlinearly relevant to the momentum of particle, whose friction coefficient can be expressed as the function of the kinetic energy of the particle. The correlation strength of noises is inhomogeneous in the such system, maybe due to the strength of gravitational field. This implies that the gradient of correlation strength is the function of gravitational force. With the Taylor?s low order approximation, the stationary solution of the two-vector variable Fokker–Planck equation is the power law form in self-gravitational system. This Letter also verifies that the neutrino flux deviation from the theory value in the solar core is due to the same mechanism.     

Identification of orthotropic elastic constants using the Eigenfunction Virtual Fields Method

The Virtual Fields Method (VFM – Pierron and Grediac, 2012), an inverse method based on the principle of virtual work (PVW), is being increasingly used to estimate mechanical properties of materials from full-field deformations obtained from techniques such as Digital Image Correlation, moiré and speckle interferometry and grid methods. By making specific choices for virtual fields (VFs) in PVW, one obtains a system of algebraic equations, which is then solved for the unknown material constants. Recently, a new variant of VFM, known as the Eigenfunction Virtual Fields Method (EVFM) has been proposed (Subramanian, 2013). In EVFM, principal components of the measured (i.e. true) strain fields are used to systematically generate VFs. We extend EVFM to orthotropic elastic materials in this work, and estimate the relevant material parameters from full-field strain data generated from a finite-element model of an unnotched Iosipescu test. Varying levels of Gaussian white noise are added to the synthetic strain data to evaluate the sensitivity of EVFM to input noise. It is observed that for low to moderate noise, the material properties estimated by the proposed method are relatively insensitive to noise. However, when noise levels are high, the proposed method yields large variance in some of the computed properties when compared to the state-of-the-art optimized piecewise continuous VFM (Toussaint et al., 2006; Pierron and Grediac, 2012). Some of the large variance in properties estimated from noisy data using EVFM is traced to the sensitivity of the third dominant eigenfunction and modifications to the proposed method to address this issue are suggested.