As(III) Determination in the Presence of Pb(II) by Differential Alternative Pulses Voltammetry

Differential Alternative Pulses Voltammetry (DAPV), introduced by the authors earlier, was applied with HMDE for direct As(III) determination in the presence of Pb(II) in natural water without sample pretreatment. Distinguishable peaks of As(III) and Pb(II) were registered in 1 M HCl supporting electrolyte at a concentration ratio as high as 1 : 6, while complete peak overlapping occurs applying DPP at any concentration ratio at the same experimental conditions. In‐situ As(III) determinations in the presence of Pb(II) in contaminated ground waters in Mexico were performed, using especially designed disposable safe mercury drop electrodes.     

q-plane wave solutions of q-deformed equations with quantum conformal symmetry

We construct explicit solutions of a hierarchy of q-deformed equations which are quantum conformal invariant. The solutions are given in terms of two different q-deformations of the plane wave written in conjugated bases.     

Richardson-extrapolated sequential splitting and its application

During numerical time integration, the accuracy of the numerical solution obtained with a given step size often proves unsatisfactory. In this case one usually reduces the step size and repeats the computation, while the results obtained for the coarser grid are not used. However, we can also combine the two solutions and obtain a better result. This idea is based on the Richardson extrapolation, a general technique for increasing the order of an approximation method. This technique also allows us to estimate the absolute error of the underlying method. In this paper we apply Richardson extrapolation to the sequential splitting, and investigate the performance of the resulting scheme on several test examples.     

Effects of emulsifier charge and concentration on pancreatic lipolysis. 1. In the absence of bile salts

An in vitro study is performed with sunflower oil-in-water emulsions to clarify the effects of type of used emulsifier, its concentration, and reaction time on the degree of oil lipolysis, α. Anionic, nonionic, and cationic surfactants are studied as emulsifiers. For all systems, three regions are observed when surfactant concentration is scaled with the critical micelle concentration, C(S)/cmc: (1) At C(S) < cmc, α ≈ 0.5 after 30 min and increases up to 0.9 after 4 h. (2) At C(S) ≈ 3 × cmc, α ≈ 0.15 after 30 min and increases steeply up to 0.9 after 2 h for the cationic and nonionic surfactants, whereas it remains around 0.2 for the anionic surfactants. (3) At C(S) above certain threshold value, α = 0 for all studied surfactants, for reaction time up to 8 h. Additional experiments show that the lipase hydrolyzes molecularly soluble substrate (tributirin) at C(S) > cmc, which is a proof that these surfactants do not denature or block the enzyme active center. Thus, we conclude that the mechanism of enzyme inhibition by these surfactants is the formation of a dense adsorption layer on an oil drop surface, which displaces the lipase from direct contact with the triglycerides.     

On the scattering of torsional elastic waves from axisymmetric defects in coated pipes

Long range ultrasonic testing is now a well established method for examining in-service degradation in pipelines. In order to protect pipelines from the surrounding environment it is common for viscoelastic coatings to be applied to the outer surface. These coatings are, however, known to impact on the ability of long range ultrasonic techniques to locate degradation, or defects, within a coated pipe. The coating dissipates sound energy travelling along the pipe, attenuating both the incident and reflected signals making responses from defects difficult to detect. This article aims to investigate the influence of a viscoelastic coating on the ability of long range ultrasonic testing to detect a defect in an axisymmetric pipe. The article focuses on understanding the behaviour of the fundamental torsional mode and quantifying the effect of bitumen coatings on reflection coefficients generated by axisymmetric defects. Reflection coefficients are measured experimentally for coated and uncoated pipes and compared to theoretical predictions generated using numerical mode matching and a hybrid finite element technique. Good agreement between prediction and measurement is observed for uncoated pipes, and it is shown that the theoretical methods presented here are fast and efficient making them suitable for studying long pipe runs. However, when studying coated pipes agreement between theory and prediction is observed to be poor for predictions based on those bulk acoustic properties currently reported in the literature for bitumen. Good agreement is observed only after conducting a parametric study to identify more appropriate values for the bulk acoustic properties. Furthermore, the reflection coefficients obtained for the fundamental torsional mode in a coated pipe show that significant sound attenuation is present over relatively short lengths of coating, thus quantifying those problems commonly encountered with the use of long range ultrasonic testing on coated pipes in the field.     

Adsorptive Stripping Voltammetric Determination of 2,4-Dichlorophenol by Laponite Modified Carbon Paste Electrode

A laponite modified carbon paste electrode was prepared, characterized and applied for the 2,4-dichlorophenol (2,4-DCP) voltammetric determination. It takes advantage of the ability of laponite to adsorb phenols, as well as of its availability and very low cost. Kinetic and equilibrium data for 2,4-DCP adsorption by laponite in aqueous dispersions demonstrated that the adsorption process obeyed a pseudo first order kinetic model and was consistent with the formation of adsorbed multilayers on a surface with heterogeneous pore distribution. The composite paste electrode exhibited a heterogeneous surface with 65 % increased surface area and 27 % enhanced catalytic activity compared to the unmodified one. The adsorptive stripping voltammetric determination of 2,4-DCP at an electrode with an optimized graphite:laponite ratio of 55 : 15 w% using a 3 min accumulation time at pH 5.5 was found to be suitable for its quantification in the linear concentration range extended up to 50 μmol L⁻¹ with a sensitivity of 0.56 μA L μmol⁻¹ and a LOD of 0.2 μmol L⁻¹ (S/N=3).The 2,4-DCP electrochemical response was not affected by the presence of some structurally similar phenols, like catechol and p-nitrophenol, while resorcinol, 2-chlorophenol, and 4-chlorophenol presented interferences. The results were validated by 2,4-DCP determination in spiked tap water.     

Solving sparse linear least-squares problems on some supercomputers by using large dense blocks

Efficient subroutines for dense matrix computations have recently been developed and are available on many high-speed computers. On some computers the speed of many dense matrix operations is near to the peak-performance. For sparse matrices storage and operations can be saved by operating only and storing only nonzero elements. However, the price is a great degradation of the speed of computations on supercomputers (due to the use of indirect addresses, to the need to insert new nonzeros in the sparse storage scheme, to the lack of data locality, etc.). On many high-speed computers a dense matrix technique is preferable to sparse matrix technique when the matrices are not large, because the high computational speed compensates fully the disadvantages of using more arithmetic operations and more storage. For very large matrices the computations must be organized as a sequence of tasks in each of which a dense block is treated. The blocks must be large enough to achieve a high computational speed, but not too large, because this will lead to a large increase in both the computing time and the storage. A special “locally optimized reordering algorithm” (LORA) is described, which reorders the matrix so that dense blocks can be constructed and treated with some standard software, say LAPACK or NAG. These ideas are implemented for linear least-squares problems. The rectangular matrices (that appear in such problems) are decomposed by an orthogonal method. Results obtained on a CRAY C92A computer demonstrate the efficiency of using large dense blocks.     

General scheme for solving linear algebraic problems by direct methods

Assume that A is an m × n real matrix with m?n and rank(A)=n. Let b be a real vector with m components and consider the problem of finding $\text{x=A}{}^2\text{b}$, where $\text{A}{}^2\text{=(A}{}^{\mathrm{T}}\text{A)}{}^{\mathrm{?1}}\text{A}{}^{\mathrm{T}}$. A general scheme for solving this problem is described. Many well-known and commonly used in practice direct methods can be found as special cases within the general scheme. This is illustrated by four examples. The general scheme can be used to study the common properties of the direct methods. The usefulness of this approach in the efforts to improve the efficiency of the direct methods for sparse matrices is demonstrated by formulating an algorithm that can be applied to any particular method belonging to the general scheme. This algorithm is implemented in several subroutines solving linear algebraic problems by different direct methods. Numerical results, obtained in a wide range of runs with these subroutines, are given.