The DaNa2.0 Knowledge Base Nanomaterials - An Important Measure Accompanying Nanomaterials Development

Nanotechnology is closely related to the tailored manufacturing of nanomaterials for a huge variety of applications. However, such applications with newly developed materials are also a reason for concern. The DaNa2.0 project provides information and support for these issues on the web in condensed and easy-to-understand wording. Thus, a key challenge in the field of advanced materials safety research is access to correct and reliable studies and validated results. For nanomaterials, there is currently a continuously increasing amount of publications on toxicological issues, but criteria to evaluate the quality of these studies are necessary to use them e.g., for regulatory purposes. DaNa2.0 discusses scientific results regarding 26 nanomaterials based on actual literature that has been selected after careful evaluation following a literature criteria checklist. This checklist is publicly available, along with a selection of standardized operating protocols (SOPs) established by different projects. The spectrum of information is rounded off by further articles concerning basics or crosscutting topics in nanosafety research. This article is intended to give an overview on DaNa2.0 activities to support reliable toxicity testing and science communication alik

Suppression of electrical breakdown phenomena in liquid TriMethyl Bismuth based ionization detectors

Organometallic liquids provide good properties for ionization detectors. TriMethyl Bismuth (TMBi) has been proposed as a detector medium with charge and Cherenkov photon readout for Positron Emission Tomography. In this work, we present studies for the handling of TMBi at different electric fields and under different environmental conditions to find applicable configurations for the suppression of electrical breakdowns in TMBi at room temperature. A simple glass cell with two electrodes filled with TMBi was constructed and tested under different operation conditions. Working at the vapour pressure of TMBi at room temperature of about 40 mbar and electric fields of up to 20 kV/cm in presence of a small oxygen contamination we found the formation of a discharge channel in the liquid and a steady increase in the current. Further reduction of pressure by pumping caused the TMBi to boil and a spontaneous combustion. Eliminating the oxygen contamination led the TMBi under the same condition to only decompose. When operating the setup under an argon atmosphere of 1 bar we did not observe breakdowns of the electrical potential up to field strengths of 20 kV/cm. Still, in presence of a small oxygen contamination fluctuating currents in the nA range were observed, but no decomposition or combustion. We conclude from our experiments that TMBi at room temperature in a pure argon atmosphere of 1 bar remains stable against electrical breakdown at least up to electric field strengths of 20 kV/cm, presumably because the formation of gaseous TMBi was prevented.Comment: 14 page, 8 figure

Multiblend JET A-1 in practice: results of an R&D project on synthetic paraffinic kerosenes

The research and demonstration project, DEMO-SPK, a model project under the German Mobility and Fuel Strategy (MFS), investigated the use of renewable kerosene at the Leipzig/Halle airport. Its primary goal was to examine and verify the behavior of blends consisting of several types of renewable kerosene and fossil JET A-1, under the realistic supply conditions of a major airport. The project demonstrated that the supply chain for multiblend JET A-1 was technically feasible and that the fuel could be used without requiring any changes in the normal operating procedures. The project also confirmed that the use of multiblend JET A-1 resulted in a 30–60% reduction in particulate emissions for ground operations and a reduction in CO2 equivalents, compared with pure fossil JET A-1.The R&D project on the use of renewable kerosene at Leipzig/Halle airport (DEMO-SPK) involved the collaboration of more than 20 international partners from industry and science. It was initiated as a model project of the Mobility and Fuel Strategy (MFS) and financed by the Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure (BMVI)

A surface science compatible epifluorescence microscope for inspection of samples under ultra high vacuum and cryogenic conditions

We modified an epi-illumination light microscope and mounted it on an ultra high vacuum chamber for investigating samples used in a surface science experiment. For easy access and bake out, all optical components are placed outside the vacuum and the sample is imaged through a glass window. The microscope can be operated in reflection brightfield or epifluorescence mode to image the sample surface or fluorescent dye molecules adsorbed on it. The homemade sample mounting was made compatible for the use under the microscope; sample temperatures as low as 6 K can be achieved. The performance of the microscope is demonstrated on two model samples: Brightfield-images of a well-prepared Ag(100) surface show a macroscopic corrugation of the surface, although low energy electron diffraction data indicate a highly ordered crystalline surface. The surface shows macroscopic protrusions with flat regions, about 20–200 μm in diameter, in between. Fluorescence images of diluted 3,4,9,10-perylene tetracarboxylicacid dianhydride (PTCDA) molecules adsorbed on an ultrathin epitaxial KCl film on the Ag(100) surface show a shading effect at surface protrusions due to an inclined angle of incidence of the PTCDA beam during deposition. For some preparations, the distribution of the fluorescence intensity is inhomogeneous and shows a dense network of bright patches about 5 μm in diameter related to the macroscopic corrugation of the surface. We propose that such a light microscope can aid many surface science experiments, especially those dealing with epitaxial growth or fluorescent material

Gardens4Science: Setting Up a Trusted Network for German Botanic Gardens Using Open Source Technologies

Botanic gardens are an invaluable refuge for plant diversity for conservation, education and research. Worldwide, they manage over 100,000 species, roughly 30% of all plant species diversity, and over 41% of known threatened species; the botanic gardens in Germany house approximately 50,000 different species (Marquardt et al. in press). Scientists in need of plant material rely upon these resources for their research; they require a pooled, up-to-date inventory of ideally all accessions of these gardens. Sharing data from (living) specimen collections online has become routine in the past years; initiatives like PlantSearch of Botanic Gardens Conservation International and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) allow requesting specimens of interest. However, these catalogues are accessible for everyone. Legitimate concerns about potential theft and legal issues keep curators of living collections from sharing their full catalogues; in most cases, only filtered views of the data will be fed into these networks. Gardens4Science (http://gardens4science.biocase.org) aims at overcoming this issue by creating a trusted network between botanic gardens that allows an unfiltered access on the constituents’ accession catalogues. This unified data pool needs to be automatically synchronized with the individual garden’s catalogues, irrespective of the collection management systems used locally. For the three-year construction phase of Gardens4Science, focus is on Cactaceae and Bromeliaceae, since these families are well-represented in the collections and ideal models for studying the origin of biodiversity on evolutionary time scale. Gardens4Science’s technical architecture (Fig. 1) is based on existing tools for setting up biodiversity networks: The BioCASe (Biological Collections Access Service) Provider Software acts as an interface to the local databases that shields the network from their peculiarities (database management systems and data models used). BioCASe transforms the data into the Access to Biological Collections Data schema (ABCD) and publishes them as a BioCASe-compliant web service (Holetschek and Döring 2008, Holetschek et al. 2012). The data portal is based on portal software from the Global Genome Biodiversity Network and provides a user-specific view on the data. Registered trusted users will be able to display full details of individual accessions, whereas guest users will see only an aggregated view (Droege et al. 2014). The Berlin Indexing and Harvesting Toolkit (B-HIT) is used for harvesting the BioCASe web services of the local catalogues and creating a unified index database (Kelbert et al. 2015). Harvesting is done in regular intervals in order to keep the index in sync with the source databases and does not require any action on the provider’s side. In addition to harvesting, B-HIT performs several data cleaning steps. Foremost, it reconciles scientific names from the source databases with a taxonomic backbone (currently caryophyllales.org for Cactaceae and the Butcher and Gouda checklist for Bromeliaceae), which allows harmonizing the taxonomies from the different sources and the correction of outdated species names and orthographic mistakes. Provenance information are validated (for example specified geographic coordinates versus country) and corrected, if possible; date values are parsed and converted into a standard format. The issues found and potential corrections are compiled in reports and send to the curators, so the mistakes can be rectified in the source databases. In the construction phase, Gardens4Science consists of seven German Botanic gardens that share their accessions of the Bromeliaceae and Cactaceae families. Up to now (March 2019), 19.539 records have been published in Evo-BoGa, with about 3,500 to be added until the end of the project in January 2020. After the construction phase, it is planned to extend the network to include more Botanic Gardens – both from Germany and other countries – as well as additional plant families

The DaNa2.0 Knowledge Base Nanomaterials—An Important Measure Accompanying Nanomaterials Development

Nanotechnology is closely related to the tailored manufacturing of nanomaterials for a huge variety of applications. However, such applications with newly developed materials are also a reason for concern. The DaNa2.0 project provides information and support for these issues on the web in condensed and easy-to-understand wording. Thus, a key challenge in the field of advanced materials safety research is access to correct and reliable studies and validated results. For nanomaterials, there is currently a continuously increasing amount of publications on toxicological issues, but criteria to evaluate the quality of these studies are necessary to use them e.g., for regulatory purposes. DaNa2.0 discusses scientific results regarding 26 nanomaterials based on actual literature that has been selected after careful evaluation following a literature criteria checklist. This checklist is publicly available, along with a selection of standardized operating protocols (SOPs) established by different projects. The spectrum of information is rounded off by further articles concerning basics or crosscutting topics in nanosafety research. This article is intended to give an overview on DaNa2.0 activities to support reliable toxicity testing and science communication alike

Feasibility of In-Line Raman Spectroscopy for Quality Assessment in Food Industry: How Fast Can We Go?

Raman spectroscopy is a viable tool within process analytical technologies due to recent technological advances. In this article, we evaluate the feasibility of Raman spectroscopy for in-line applications in the food industry by estimating the concentration of the fatty acids EPA + DHA in ground salmon samples (n = 63) and residual bone concentration in samples of mechanically recovered ground chicken (n = 66). The samples were measured under industry like conditions: They moved on a conveyor belt through a dark cabinet where they were scanned with a wide area illumination standoff Raman probe. Such a setup should be able to handle relevant industrial conveyor belt speeds, and it was studied how different speeds (i.e., exposure times) influenced the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the Raman spectra as well as the corresponding model performance. For all samples we applied speeds that resulted in 1 s, 2 s, 4 s, and 10 s exposure times. Samples were scanned in both heterogenous and homogenous state. The slowest speed (10 s exposure) yielded prediction errors (RMSECV) of 0.41%EPA + DHA and 0.59% ash for the salmon and chicken data sets, respectively. The more in-line relevant exposure time of 1 s resulted in increased RMSECV values, 0.84% EPA + DHA and 0.84% ash, respectively. The increase in prediction error correlated closely with the decrease in SNR. Further improvements of model performance were possible through different noise reduction strategies. Model performance for homogenous and heterogenous samples was similar, suggesting that the presented Raman scanning approach has the potential to work well also on intact heterogenous foods. The estimation errors obtained at these high speeds are likely acceptable for industrial use, but successful strategies to increase SNR will be key for widespread in-line use in the food industry.Feasibility of In-Line Raman Spectroscopy for Quality Assessment in Food Industry: How Fast Can We Go?publishedVersio

Feasibility of In-Line Raman Spectroscopy for Quality Assessment in Food Industry: How Fast Can We Go?

Raman spectroscopy is a viable tool within process analytical technologies due to recent technological advances. In this article, we evaluate the feasibility of Raman spectroscopy for in-line applications in the food industry by estimating the concentration of the fatty acids EPA + DHA in ground salmon samples (n = 63) and residual bone concentration in samples of mechanically recovered ground chicken (n = 66). The samples were measured under industry like conditions: They moved on a conveyor belt through a dark cabinet where they were scanned with a wide area illumination standoff Raman probe. Such a setup should be able to handle relevant industrial conveyor belt speeds, and it was studied how different speeds (i.e., exposure times) influenced the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the Raman spectra as well as the corresponding model performance. For all samples we applied speeds that resulted in 1 s, 2 s, 4 s, and 10 s exposure times. Samples were scanned in both heterogenous and homogenous state. The slowest speed (10 s exposure) yielded prediction errors (RMSECV) of 0.41%EPA + DHA and 0.59% ash for the salmon and chicken data sets, respectively. The more in-line relevant exposure time of 1 s resulted in increased RMSECV values, 0.84% EPA + DHA and 0.84% ash, respectively. The increase in prediction error correlated closely with the decrease in SNR. Further improvements of model performance were possible through different noise reduction strategies. Model performance for homogenous and heterogenous samples was similar, suggesting that the presented Raman scanning approach has the potential to work well also on intact heterogenous foods. The estimation errors obtained at these high speeds are likely acceptable for industrial use, but successful strategies to increase SNR will be key for widespread in-line use in the food industry