Development and validation of an analytical methodology for the determination of p,p′-DDT, p,p′-DDE and p,p′-DDD in fish oil pills

An analytical methodology was proposed and validated to be applied to the determination of p,p′-DDT and its metabolites p,p′-DDE and p,p′-DDD in fish oil. The analytical procedure presented in this paper involves a single-step clean up process prior to the analysis. A solution of 1,2,3,4-tetrachloronaphtalene was used as internal standard.The analytical technique used was gas chromatography coupled to an electron capture detector. Details on the validation process are provided.The limits of detection ranged from 2.6 to 4.7 pg μL^− 1. The BCR 598 standard reference material (cod liver oil) was used to evaluate the performance of the methodology with satisfactory recoveries for all the compounds.The analytes were determined in three different fish oil pills sold in Spain as a supplementary vitamin support. The sum of p,p′-DDT and metabolites was from 13.2 to 51.3 ng g^− 1, the dominant compound being p,p′-DDE.     

Variable-step variable-order 3-stage Hermite-Birkhoff-Obrechkoff DDE solver of order 4 to 14

This article presents a solver for delay differential equations (DDEs) called HBO414DDE based on a hybrid variable-step variable-order 3-stage Hermite-Birkhoff-Obrechkoff ODE solver of order 4 to 14. The current version of our method solves DDEs with state dependent, non-vanishing, small, vanishing and asymptotically vanishing delays, except neutral type and initial value DDEs. Delayed values are computed using Hermite interpolation, small delays are dealt with by extrapolation, and discontinuities are located by a bisection method. HBO414DDE was tested on several problems and results were compared with those of known solvers like SYSDEL and the recent Matlab DDE solver ddesd and statistics show that it gives, most of the time, a smaller relative error than the other solvers for the same number of function evaluations.     

光机系统集成分析仿真研究

在与传统的光机系统设计方法对比下,构建了光机系统集成分析仿真的基本框架.以望远镜镜面为研究对象,选择Patran,Matlab/Simulink和Zemax作为软件环境,分别建立各自的独立模型,探讨了光机系统集成化分析的实现策略.在简要研究模型创建、模型简化等技术的基础上,编制了结构控制接口工具,实现了光机系统结构和控制的集成分析.在研究动态数据交换(DDE)技术的基础上,探讨了大数目光线追迹问题的解决方案,实现了Matlab和Zemax的动态数据交换和光机系统的光控集成分析,达到了光机系统光机控制集成分析的目的.     

OSCILLATION CRITERIA FOR DELAY DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS WITH IMPULSES

The present paper is devoted to the investigation of the oscillation of second order nonlinear delay differential equation (DDE) with impulses, sufficient conditions of oscillation for the solutions of DDE with impulses are obtained by using differential inequality. Some known results are improved and generalized.     

Pesticides in water and the performance of the liquid-phase microextraction based techniques. A review

The control of pesticides in surface, drinking and groundwater is nowadays a real necessity. In the European Community, their concentration must comply with the established parametric and environmental quality standards (EQSs). Regarding the new legislation, this article updates the information concerning the monitoring of pesticides and the technical specifications for their measurement in water samples where ultra-sensitive analytical methods are required. For some compounds, like pesticides, there is still a need to improve the performance of the existing methods. High sensitive techniques like gas chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (GC–MS/MS) and liquid chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry (LC–MS) have been developed. However, for most of the substances present at trace and ultra-trace levels the extraction and preconcentration steps are so far essential for their detection. Advances at a micro scale have been made and different types of microextractions are being developed. Liquid-phase microextraction (LPME) is an example. The study of this technique has increased in the last years and some innovations have been recently reported for pesticides water analysis. This article reviews the new developed LPME-based techniques and compares its performance with the analytical specifications established for pesticides water monitoring. The results show that LPME-based techniques can be a promising tool to improve the nowadays performance of methods used in pesticides water control.     

Algorithmic computation of generalized symmetries of nonlinear evolution and lattice equations

A straightforward algorithm for the symbolic computation of generalized (higher‐order) symmetries of nonlinear evolution equations and lattice equations is presented. The scaling properties of the evolution or lattice equations are used to determine the polynomial form of the generalized symmetries. The coefficients of the symmetry can be found by solving a linear system. The method applies to polynomial systems of PDEs of first order in time and arbitrary order in one space variable. Likewise, lattices must be of first order in time but may involve arbitrary shifts in the discretized space variable. The algorithm is implemented in Mathematica and can be used to test the integrability of both nonlinear evolution equations and semi‐discrete lattice equations. With our Integrability Package, generalized symmetries are obtained for several well‐known systems of evolution and lattice equations. For PDEs and lattices with parameters, the code allows one to determine the conditions on these parameters so that a sequence of generalized symmetries exists. The existence of a sequence of such symmetries is a predictor for integrability. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Comparative quantitative study of DDT and its metabolites in human milk by gas chromatography with electron capture and mass spectrometric detection

Summary Comparative analytical quantitation of DDE, DDD, and DDT in human milk, by gas chromatography with mass spectrometric and electron capture detection (GC-MS and GC-ECD) has been studied by use of 513 samples of milk from lactating mothers participating in a World Health Organization special study. Although Correlation between thep,p-DDE concentrations measured by GC-ECD and GC-MSD was excellent (r=0.950,P<0.0001) and correlation was significant and moderate forp,p-DDD andp,p-DDT, the best precision was obtained by use of GC-MS. This study has therefore demonstrated that GC-MSD is a useful tool for determining the concentration of DDT and its metabolites, because it enables simultaneous detection and confirmation.     

From ODE to DDE

In this paper, by considering ordinary differential equation (ODE) as a special case and a starting point of delay differential equation (DDE), we will show that some typical topological methods such as continuation theorems can be applied to detect some dynamics of DDE like periodic solutions. Several problems will be presented.      

Bifurcation analysis of bacteria and bacteriophage coexistence in the presence of bacterial debris

The dynamics of bacteria and bacteriophage coexistence in the presence of bacterial debris, in a marine environment, was studied using a system of delay differential equations (DDE). The system exhibits a rich variety of behavior in terms of two control parameters values: the bacteriophage burst size β, and the lysing time delay τ. Limit cycles of various periodicity, quasiperiodicity, period doubling, chaotic bands and toroidal chaos were identified using basic tools of non-linear dynamics analysis: first return maps, Poincaré sections, Fourier spectrum, and largest Lyapunov exponents.     

Demasking large dummy effects approach in revealing important interactions in Plackett–Burman experimental design

This paper presents a newly developed demasking large dummy effects (DDE) approach for identification of significant factor interactions in Plackett–Burman experimental design. Dummy factors, as imaginary factors, are not expected to contribute to the model, so the appearance of their high effect values could indicate the significance of the interactions they are confounded with. DDE approach consists of the screening of the large estimable effects, the calculation of the interactions that contribute the most to the large dummy effects from the alias matrix, and a single pass of all subsets regressions including preselected interactions and main factors for the final model tuning. Tested on experimentally obtained data from a robustness analysis of a method for the determination of raloxifene and its four impurities, DDE approach showed to create the models that have greater statistical power than the ones described with the main factors only, which makes them more reliable and accurate for the application. Additionally, because of the interactions selection criterion and final tuning phase of the strategy, DDE approach allows the creation of models that are likely to better describe the real systems, which increases the practical value. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.