Ester derivatives of α-hydroxymethylacrylates: Itaconate isomers giving high molecular weight polymers

New ester derivatives of ethyl α-hydroxymethylacrylate were synthesized using acid chlorides (traditional solution reactions), sodium salts of acids (with phase transfer catalysis), and trifluoroacetic anhydride (trifluoroacetate). The interfacial process gave high yields of clean products under very mild conditions. Derivatives obtained include the formate, acetate, hexanoate, stearate, benzoate, trifluoroacetate, and adamantanoate. Bulk polymerizations with 2,2′-azobis (isobutyronitrile) gave high molecular weight polymers with intrinsic viscosities of over 2 dL/g and molecular weights of several million [based on size-exclusion chromatography (SEC) comparison to polystyrene standards]. These high molecular weights were the result of autoacceleration in the bulk as shown by monitoring molecular weight with respect to conversion. Solution polymerization in benzene gave more typical polymer, e.g., the acetate derivative showed an SEC molecular weight of 52,000. Glass transition temperatures for the n-alkyl esters decreased from the formate (77°C) to the hexanoate (15°C); the stearate showed a side-chain melting point of 40°C but no T_g. Glass transitions were observed for the trifluoroacetate, benzoate, and adamantanoate polymers at 69, 130, and 214°C, respectively. Solution ¹³C-NMR showed evidence of tacticity information for the formate and acetate derivatives with appaent preference for syndiotactic polymer formation similar to that of methyl methacrylate. FTIR and solid-state ¹³C-NMR analysis gave spectra with functional group peaks and chemical shift values expected based on composition. The stearate monomer and polymer gave solid-state ¹³C chemical shifts of 34 and 33 ppm, respectively, for the central CH₂ units consistent with monoclinic and orthorhombic crystal packing. © 1994 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Optimization of tetramethoxysilane-derived sol gel entrapment protocol stabilizes highly active chlorophyllase

Entrapment of membrane proteins is a challenging task compared to that involving soluble proteins. Chlorophyllase, a membrane protein, was successfully entrapped in tetramethoxysilane-derived sol-gel. Pre-gel sol typically consists of an aqueous suspension of chlorophyllase, precursors including tetramethoxysilane and/or methytrimethoxysilane, and sodium fluoride as catalyst. To obtain a highly active entrapped enzyme preparation, the effects of various immobilization parameters, including the chemical compositions of pre-gel sol (water/silane ratio, precursor type and proportions, enzyme loading, sodium fluoride concentration), and sol-gel process parameters (aging and drying time and approach) have been investigated. Chlorophyllase demonstrated the highest activity in gel derived from a pre-gel sol with water/silane ratio of 30 and enzyme loading of 0.257 mg_protein/g_gel, and showed moderately lower activity in organically modified sol-gel than that in hydrophilic sol-gel. The effects of water/silane ratio and precursor combinations on the activity of entrapped chlorophyllase were also studied by examining the pore morphology of gel via nitrogen adsorption-desorption. Longer aging time leads to an entrapped chlorophyllase preparation with higher activity. Chlorophyllase preparation demonstrated negligible activity after air-drying for 12 h while lyophilized chlorophyllase preparation demonstrated 8, 4 and 4 times higher activity than air-dried, vacuum-dried and solvent-dried preparations. Chlorophyllase demonstrated 30% higher activity in the improved sol-gel protocol than that from a non-optimized sol-gel protocol developed in a previous study.     

Studies on Azolylacetonitriles: The Reactivity of Thiazole-2-yl,Thiadiazol-2-yl Acetonitriles Toward Electrophilic Reagents

5-Acetyl-2-cyanomethyl-4-methylthiazole, 2-aminothiazole, and 5-N-benzoylamino-1,3,4-thiadiazole-2-yl-acetonitrile react with acetone, and malononitrile derivatives in the presence of sulfur to yield the corresponding thiophene derivatives. Also, 4-furylmethylene-2-phenyl-2-oxazolin-5-ones react with thiophenol, and/or thionaphthol to give the thiolester derivatives in one-pot synthesis. The structures of the products were based on IR, 1 H NMR, and elemental analysis.     

Nanostructured Lipid Carriers (NLC) for Biologically Active Green Tea and Fennel Natural Oils Delivery: Larvicidal and Adulticidal Activities against Culex pipiens

(1) Background: The control of mosquitoes with essential oils is a growing demand. (2) Methods: This study evaluated the novel larvicidal and adulticidal activity of fennel and green tea oils and their nanostructured lipid carriers (NLC) against Culex pipiens (C. pipiens) in the laboratory, field conditions and evaluated their effect against non-target organisms. SLN type II nanoformulations were synthesized and characterized using dynamic light scattering (DLS), zeta potential and transmission electron microscope. (3) Results: The synthesized NLCs showed spherical shaped, homogenous, narrow, and monomodal particle size distribution. The mortality percent (MO%) post-treatment (PT) with 2000 ppm for 24 h with fennel oil and NLC fennel (NLC-F) reached 85% (LC₅₀ = 643.81 ppm) and 100% (LC₅₀ = 251.71), whereas MO% for green tea oil and NLC green tea (NLC-GT) were 80% (LC₅₀ = 746.52 ppm) and 100% (LC₅₀ = 278.63 ppm), respectively. Field trial data showed that the larval reduction percent of fennel oil and NLC-F reached 89.8% and 97.4%, 24 h PT and the reduction percent of green tea oil and NLC-GT reached 89% and 93%, 24 h PT with persistence reached 8 and 7 days, for NLC-F and NLC-GT, respectively. The adulticidal effects showed that NLC-F and NLC-GT (100% mortality) were more effective than fennel and green tea oils (90.0% and 83.33%), with 24 h PT, respectively. Moreover, their reduction of adult density after spraying with LC₉₅ X2 for 15 min, with fennel oil, NLC-F, and green tea oil, NLC-GT were 83.6%, 100%, 79.1%, and 100%, respectively, with persistence (>50%) lasting for three days. The predation rate of the mosquitofish, Gambusia affinis, and the bug, Sphaerodema urinator, was not affected in both oil and its NLC, while the predation rate of the beetle, Cybister tripunctatus increased (66% and 68.3%) by green tea oil and NLC-GT, respectively. (4) Conclusions: NLCs nanoformulation encapsulated essential oils was prepared successfully with unique properties of size, morphology, and stability. In vitro larvicidal and adulticidal effects against C. pipiens supported with field evaluations have been performed using essential oils and their nanoformulations. The biological evaluation of nanoformulations manifested potential results toward both larvicidal and adulticidal compared to the essential oils themselves, especially NLC encapsulated fennel oil which had promising larvicidal and adulticidal activity.     

Hubbing and routing in postal delivery systems

We consider the combined hubbing and routing problem in postal delivery systems and develop an iterative two-stage solution procedure for the problem. In the first stage, hub locations are determined and postal offices are multiply allocated to the hubs. The second stage gives the routes in hub regions that alter the distances between points used in the hub-location problem. The procedure then iterates between two stages by updating the distances used in hubbing in order to produce a route-compatible hub configuration. Computational experience is reported for the test problems taken from the literature. For a case study Turkish postal delivery system data are utilized. As the case study is applied on a road network, a final stage, seeking improvements based on special structures in the routed network, is appended to the two-stage solution procedure.     

Effect of Li2O doping on electrical properties of CoFe2O4

The solid–solid interactions between cobalt and ferric oxides to produce CoFe₂O₄ were followed up using XRD investigation. The effect of Li₂O-doping on the ferrite formation was also studied. The electrical and dielectric parameters of pure and doped mixed solids precalcined at 1273 K were measured using d.c and a.c instruments.The dopant concentration was varied between 0.5 and 6 mol% Li₂O. The results obtained revealed that Li₂O doping much enhanced the ferrite formation due to an increase in the mobility of the reacting species.

The addition of the smallest amount of Li₂O (0.5 mol%) resulted in measurable variations in the electrical constants (ρ, E_a, ′, ″ and tan δ). Resistivity increased upon increasing the dopant concentration up to 1.5 mol% exceeding the values measured for the undoped sample. Furthermore, the presence of 6 mol% Li₂O brought about a significant decrease of electrical resistivity. Also, the activation energy decreased with increasing the dopant concentration. The dielectric constant behaves according to ε=const. 1/ρ^1/2.

The Li₂O-doping modified the values of different dielectric constants, the change in these constants was found to be strongly dependent on the amount of Li₂O added.These results have been discussed in terms of the potentiality of Li₂O in increasing the mobility of the reacting species involved in the ferrite formation.     

Mechanisms of Cobalt/Phosphine-Catalyzed Cross-Coupling Reactions

>The combination of CoCl₂ with bidentate phosphines is known to catalyze challenging cross-coupling and Heck-type reactions, but the mechanisms of these valuable transformations have not been established. Here, we use electrospray-ionization mass spectrometry to intercept the species formed in these reactions. Our results indicate that a sequence of transmetalation, reductive elimination, and redox disproportionation convert the cobalt(II) precatalyst into low-valent cobalt complexes. These species readily transfer single electrons to alkyl bromides, which thereupon dissociate into alkyl radicals and Br⁻. In cross-coupling reactions, the alkyl radicals add to the cobalt catalyst to form observable heteroleptic complexes, which release the coupling products through reductive eliminations. In the Heck-type reactions, the low abundance of newly formed ionic species renders the analysis more difficult. Nonetheless, our results also point to the occurrence of single-electron transfer processes and the involvement of radicals in these transformations.     

Weighted extended b-splines for one-dimensional electromagnetic problems

This paper considers the weighted extended b-splines as basis function for finite element method in electromagnetics and compares with the standard finite element method applied to the two-point boundary value problems with different boundary conditions. This new approach, which provides more accurate results than standard finite element method, is presented to compare other numerical techniques and applied to one-dimensional electromagnetic problems. Computed results are compared with other numerical results in literature.     

Optimal allocation and processing time decisions on non-identical parallel CNC machines: ϵ-constraint approach

When the processing times of jobs are controllable, selected processing times affect both the manufacturing cost and the scheduling performance. A well known example for such a case that this paper specifically deals with is the turning operation on a CNC machine. Manufacturing cost of a turning operation is a nonlinear convex function of its processing time. In this paper, we deal with making optimal machine-job assignments and processing time decisions so as to minimize total manufacturing cost while the makespan being upper bounded by a known value, denoted as ?-constraint approach for a bicriteria problem. We then give optimality properties for the resulting single criterion problem. We provide alternative methods to compute cost lower bounds for partial schedules, which are used in developing an exact (branch and bound) algorithm. For the cases where the exact algorithm is not efficient in terms of computation time, we present a recovering beam search algorithm equipped with an improvement search procedure. In order to find improving search directions, the improvement search algorithm uses the proposed cost bounding properties. Computational results show that our lower bounding methods in branch and bound algorithm achieve a significant reduction in the search tree size that we need to traverse. Also, our recovering beam search and improvement search heuristics achieve solutions within 1% of the optimum on the average while they spent much less computational effort than the exact algorithm.     

Design of single polarization single mode dispersion compensating photonic crystal fiber

In this paper, we present a photonic crystal fiber based on hexagonal structure for improved negative dispersion as well as high birefringence in the telecom wavelength bands. It is demonstrated that it is possible to obtain negative dispersion coefficient of −712 ps/(nm km) and relative dispersion slope (RDS) perfectly match to that of single mode fiber (SMF) of about 0.0036 nm⁻¹ at the operating wavelength 1550 nm. The proposed fiber exhibits high birefringence of the order 2.11 × 10⁻² with nonlinear coefficient about 57.57 W⁻¹ km⁻¹ at 1550 nm. Moreover, it is confirmed that the designed fiber successfully operates as a single mode in the entire band of interest.