Evaluation of various fire retardants for use in wood flour-polyethylene composites

Wood-plastic composites represent a growing class of materials used by the residential construction industry and the furniture industry. For some applications in these industries, the fire performance of the material must be known, and in some cases improved. However, the fire performance of wood-plastic composites is not well understood, and there is little information regarding the effectiveness of various fire retardants in the public domain. We used oxygen index and cone calorimeter tests to characterize the fire performance of wood flour-polyethylene composites, and compared the results with unfilled polyethylene and solid wood. We then evaluated the effect of five additive-type fire retardants on fire performance. Generally, magnesium hydroxide and ammonium polyphosphate improved the fire performance of WPCs the most while a bromine-based fire retardant and zinc borate improved fire performance the least.     

Convergence of MPFA on triangulations and for Richards' equation

Spatial discretization of transport and transformation processes in porous media requires techniques that handle general geometry, discontinuous coefficients and are locally mass conservative. Multi‐point flux approximation (MPFA) methods are such techniques, and we will here discuss some formulations on triangular grids with further application to the nonlinear Richards equation. The MPFA methods will be rewritten to mixed form to derive stability conditions and error estimates. Several MPFA versions will be shown, and the versions will be discussed with respect to convergence, symmetry and robustness when the grids are rough. It will be shown that the behavior may be quite different for challenging cases of skewness and roughness of the simulation grids. Further, we apply the MPFA discretization approach for the Richards equation and derive new error estimates without extra regularity requirements. The analysis will be accompanied by numerical results for grids that are relevant for practical simulation. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Energy decay for the elastic wave equation with a local time-dependent nonlinear damping

In this paper, we shall investigate the decay property of the solutions to the initial-boundary value problem for the elastic wave equation with a local time-dependent nonlinear damping. We give some decay rate of the energy when the damping term is effective only in a neighborhood of a suitable subset of the boundary. The results obtained in this paper extend, in particular, the known results for the scalar wave equation.     

Pricing strategies for perishable products: the case of Vienna and the hotel reservation system hrs.com

Consider a retailer who sells perishable products for which there is uncertain demand. Yield management with dynamic pricing is a standard practice that firms use for revenue management. For perishable products, recent analysis has focused on the distribution of flight capacity, referred to as ticket sales. Other non- storable, non-transportable, immaterial hospitality products include hotel capacity. The article discusses the extent to which hotel pricing strategies vary within the internet distribution system hrs.com. This study focuses on the distribution of hotel rooms available for booking on the internet for Vienna and gives an outlook to Euroland capitals. The main research interests are the underlying pricing models and the setting of the end price. Data was taken from hrs.com, which is the most important specialist for hotel room internet distribution in Germany according to recent studies by KMPG and others. The results include the identification of different pricing strategy clusters with regard to hotel category and hotel availability over a 22-day period for Vienna and one city from all Euroland countries (the capitals were studied for all cases except for the Netherlands, for which data was collected for Amsterdam). The study took the arrival days Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays into account, and used data for all these days from the 11th of July, 2005, to the 10th of October, 2005, for Vienna, and the first and the last of these dates as a comparison base for the other Euroland cities.     

Effect of shear on human insulin in zinc suspension

Human insulin in zinc suspension was used as a model protein to test the effect of shear on the settling rate of proteins, a possible inference for protein denaturation. The rate of settling was determined directly in a spectropho-tometer. Shear effects are important in retaining the activity of proteins and are present in bubble, foam, and droplet protein fractionation processes. A sim pletest, such as that conducted here, mayeven be useful for monitoring changes in protein structure caused by commercial shipping of the protein. The settling ratefor insulin was continously monitored in theoriginal bottle by spectrophotometric absorbance changes as a function of time. A settling curve was determined following each shear experiment, which included shaking the “worked” insulin solution in a vortex mixer for different lengths of time. It was determined, when comparing long shaking times with short ones, that the initial settling rate was less for the long-term shaking of the insulin samples and greater for the short-term shaking. The secondary effects of light and heat, along with shaking, a pparently did not produce differences from shaking alone.     

Electron Transfer Reaction between M-C_6H_6 and M~ -C_6H_6 Complexes in the Gas Phase: Density Functional Theory Study

Significant progress has been made in understanding the nature of the transition state andthe paths for electron transfer, especially the influences of environmental factors and themolecular properties on the electron transfer rate. These classical and semi-classical, aswell as quantum-mechanical theory, have been very successful in rationalizing severalstructure-reactivity relationships and in predicting novel features of reactivity. Thesemodels established some links between the electron tra…     

Numerical simulations of the steady Navier–Stokes equations using adaptive meshing schemes

In this paper, we consider an adaptive meshing scheme for solution of the steady incompressible Navier–Stokes equations by finite element discretization. The mesh refinement and optimization are performed based on an algorithm that combines the so‐called conforming centroidal Voronoi Delaunay triangulations (CfCVDTs) and residual‐type local a posteriori error estimators. Numerical experiments in the two‐dimensional space for various examples are presented with quadratic finite elements used for the velocity field and linear finite elements for the pressure. The results show that our meshing scheme can equally distribute the errors over all elements in some optimal way and keep the triangles very well shaped as well at all levels of refinement. In addition, the convergence rates achieved are close to the best obtainable. Extension of this approach to three‐dimensional cases is also discussed and the main challenge is the efficient implementation of three‐dimensional CfCVDT generation that is still under development. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Global a posteriori error estimates for convection–reaction–diffusion problems

In this note we propose a nonstandard technique for constructing global a posteriori error estimates for the stationary convection–reaction–diffusion equation. In order to estimate the approximation error in appropriate weighted energy norms, which measures the overall quality of the approximations, the underlying bilinear form is decomposed into several terms which can be directly computed or easily estimated from above using elementary tools of functional analysis. Several auxiliary parameters are introduced to construct such a splitting and tune the resulting upper error bound. It is demonstrated how these parameters can be chosen in some natural and convenient way for computations so that the weighted energy norm of the error is almost recovered, which shows that the estimates proposed are, in fact, quasi-sharp. The presented methodology is completely independent of numerical techniques used to compute approximate solutions. In particular, it is applicable to approximations which fail to satisfy the Galerkin orthogonality, e.g., due to an inconsistent stabilization, flux limiting, low-order quadrature rules, round-off and iteration errors etc. Moreover, the only constant that appears in the proposed error estimates is of global nature and comes from the Friedrichs–Poincaré inequality.     

A Theoretical Study on Nonadiabatic Trapping Models of the Reaction NH H←→N H_2

ThehydrogenatomtransferreactionNH H-N H,isanimportantreactioninradicalreactionsandthegas-phrasethermatdecompositionofammonia.Therewereseveralstudiesonthisreactioninexperiment]andtheory='3.Inthispaper,wehaveemployedtheunifiedstatisticaltheory'(UST)tos...     

利用小车的上班族在拥有辐射环状交通网络的城市工作区内通勤时的平均移动距离

在一拥有辐射环状交通网络的城市工作区内，使用小车上下班的职员在通勤时的平均移动距离约为多少？本文基于一个较现实的模型对此进行了理论上的解析，所得结果，从城市规划的观点来看，具有一定的实际意义。