Dissolution kinetics and mechanism of pandermite in acetic acid solutions

In this study, the dissolution kinetics and mechanism of pandermite mineral was investigated using a batch reactor employing the parameters of particle size, acid concentration, solid/liquid ratio, stirring speed and reaction temperature. From experimental data, it was determined that the conversion rate of pandermite to boric acid was increased with decreasing particle size, solid/ liquid ratio and increasing reaction temperature. Conversion rate increased up to 3 M, acid concentration then decreased with increasing acid concentration.It was observed that there was no important effect of stirring speed on the dissolution rate. Furthermore, it was observed that the dissolution mechanism was dependent on acid concentration due to restriction of dissolution in acetic acid solutions. The dissolution rate of pandermite mineral in acetic acid solution was examined according to homogeneous and heterogeneous chemical reaction model. It was determined from graphical and statistical methods that the reaction kinetics fitted to model in the form of first order pseudo homogeneous model [- ln (1 - X)] = kt and activation energy for the dissolution process was found to be 28.496 kj/mol. A mathematicalmodel, which indicated the dissolution process was established

Deciphering M-T diagram of shape memory Heusler alloys: reentrance, plateau and beyond

We present our recent results on temperature behaviour of magnetization observed in Ni_47Mn_39In_14 Heusler alloys. Three regions can be distinguished in the M-T diagram: (I) low temperature martensitic phase (with the Curie temperature T_CM = 140 K), (II) intermediate mixed phase (with the critical temperature T_MS = 230 K) exhibiting a reentrant like behavior (between T_CM and T_MS) and (III) high temperature austenitic phase (with the Curie temperature T_CA = 320 K) exhibiting a rather wide plateau region (between T_MS and T_CA). By arguing that powerful structural transformations, causing drastic modifications of the domain structure in alloys, would also trigger strong fluctuations of the order parameters throughout the entire M-T diagram, we were able to successfully fit all the data by incorporating Gaussian fluctuations (both above and below the above three critical temperatures) into the Ginzburg-Landau scenario

Renormalization group approach to vibrational energy transfer in protein

Renormalization group method is applied to the study of vibrational energy transfer in protein molecule. An effective Lagrangian and associated equations of motion to describe the resonant energy transfer are analyzed in terms of the first-order perturbative renormalization group theory that has been developed as a unified tool for global asymptotic analysis. After the elimination of singular terms associated with the Fermi resonance, amplitude equations to describe the slow dynamics of vibrational energy transfer are derived, which recover the result obtained by a technique developed in nonlinear optics [S.J. Lade, Y.S. Kivshar, Phys. Lett. A 372 (2008) 1077].Comment: 11 page

Semantic argument frequency-based Multi-Document Summarization

Semantic Role Labeling (SRL) aims to identify the constituents of a sentence, together with their roles with respect to the sentence predicates. In this paper, we introduce and assess the idea of using SRL on generic Multi-Document Summarization (MDS). We score sentences according to their inclusion of frequent semantic phrases and form the summary using the top-scored sentences. We compare this method with a term-based sentence scoring approach to investigate the effects of using semantic units instead of single words for sentence scoring. We also integrate our scoring metric as an auxiliary feature to a cutting edge summarizer with the intention of examining its effects on the performance. The experiments using datasets from the Document Understanding Conference (DUC) 2004 show that the SRL-based summarization outperforms the term-based approach as well as most of the DUC participants. © 2009 IEEE