On identifiability for chemical systems from measurable variables

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10910-013-0149-4The dynamics of the composition of chemical species in reacting systems can be characterized by a set of autonomous differential equations derived from mass conservation principles and some elementary hypothesis related to chemical reactivity. These sets of ordinary differential equations are basically non-linear, their complexity grows as much increases the number of substances present in the reacting media an can be characterized by a set of phenomenological constants which contains all the relevant information about the physical system. The determination of these kinetic constants is critical for the design or control of chemical systems from a technological point of view but the non-linear nature of the equations implies that there are hidden correlations between the parameters which maybe can be revealed with a identifiability analysis.This work has been partially supported by MTM2010-18228.Cantó Colomina, B.; Coll, C.; Sánchez, E.; Cardona Navarrete, SC.; Navarro-Laboulais, J. (2014). On identifiability for chemical systems from measurable variables. Journal of Mathematical Chemistry. 52(4):1023-1035. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10910-013-0149-4S10231035524M.J. Almendral, A. Alonso, M.S. Fuentes, Development of new methodologies for on-line determination of the bromate. J. Environ. Monit. 11, 1381–1388 (2009)A. Ben-Zvi, P.J. McLellan, K.B. McAuley, Identifiability of linear time-invariant differential-algebraic systems. I. The generalized Markov parameter approach. Ind. Eng. Chem. Res. 42, 6607–6618 (2003)T.P. Bonacquisti, A drinking water utility’s perspective on bromide, bromate, and ozonation. Toxicology 221, 145–148 (2006)R. Butler, A. Godley, L. Lytton, E. Cartmell, Bromate environmental contamination: review of impact and possible treatment. Crit. Rev. Environ. Sci. Tech. 35, 193–217 (2005)R. Butler, L. Lytton, A.R. Godley, I.E. Tothill, E. Cartmell, Bromate analysis in groundwater and wastewater samples. J. Environ. Monit. 7, 999–1006 (2005)B. Cantó, S.C. Cardona, C. Coll, J. Navarro-Laboulais, E. Sánchez, Dynamic optimization of a gas-liquid reactor. J. Math. Chem. 50, 381–393 (2012)B. Cantó, C. Coll and E. Sánchez, Identifiability of a class of discretized linear partial differential algebraic equations, Math. Problems Eng. 2011, 1–12 (2011)A. Constantinides, N. Mostoufi, Numerical Methods for Chemical Engineers with MATLAB Applications, Alkis Constantinides and Navid Mostoufi, Upper Saddle River (Prentice Hall, New Jersey, 1999)P. Englezos, N. Kalogerakis, Applied Parameter Estimation for Chemical Engineers (Marcel Dekker, New York, 2001)U. von Gunten, Ozonation of drinking water. Part II. Disinfection and by-product formation in presence of bromide, iodide or chlorine. Water Res. 37, 1469–1487 (2003)B. Legube, B. Parinet, K. Gelinet, F. Berne, J-Ph Croue, Modeling of bromate formation by ozonation of surface waters in drinking water treatment. Water Res. 38, 2185–2195 (2004)Q. Liu, L.M. Schurter, C.E. Muller, S. Aloisio, J.S. Francisco, D.W. Margerum, Kinetics and mechanisms of aqueous ozone reactions with bromide, sulfite, hydrogen sulfite, iodide, and nitrite ions. Inorg. Chem. 40, 4436–4442 (2001)J.B. Rawling, J.G. Ekerdt, Chemical Reactor Analysis and Design Fundamentals (Nob Hill Pub, Madison, 2002)W.E. Stewart, M. Caracotsios, Computer Aided Modelling of Reactive Systems (John Wiley and Sons, New York, 2008)P. Westerhoff, R. Song, G. Amy, R. Minear, Numerical kinetic models for bromide oxidation to bromine and bromate. Water Res. 32, 1687–1699 (1998)World Health Organization, Bromate in Drinking-water, Document WHO/SDE/WSH/05.08/78, http://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/dwq/chemicals/en/ (accesed 26/07/12

Scalar-field Pressure in Induced Gravity with Higgs Potential and Dark Matter

A model of induced gravity with a Higgs potential is investigated in detail in view of the pressure components related to the scalar-field excitations. The physical consequences emerging as an artifact due to the presence of these pressure terms are analysed in terms of the constraints parting from energy density, solar-relativistic effects and galactic dynamics along with the dark matter halos.Comment: 26 pages, 3 figures, Minor revision, Published in JHE

The Pioneer Anomaly

Radio-metric Doppler tracking data received from the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft from heliocentric distances of 20-70 AU has consistently indicated the presence of a small, anomalous, blue-shifted frequency drift uniformly changing with a rate of ~6 x 10^{-9} Hz/s. Ultimately, the drift was interpreted as a constant sunward deceleration of each particular spacecraft at the level of a_P = (8.74 +/- 1.33) x 10^{-10} m/s^2. This apparent violation of the Newton's gravitational inverse-square law has become known as the Pioneer anomaly; the nature of this anomaly remains unexplained. In this review, we summarize the current knowledge of the physical properties of the anomaly and the conditions that led to its detection and characterization. We review various mechanisms proposed to explain the anomaly and discuss the current state of efforts to determine its nature. A comprehensive new investigation of the anomalous behavior of the two Pioneers has begun recently. The new efforts rely on the much-extended set of radio-metric Doppler data for both spacecraft in conjunction with the newly available complete record of their telemetry files and a large archive of original project documentation. As the new study is yet to report its findings, this review provides the necessary background for the new results to appear in the near future. In particular, we provide a significant amount of information on the design, operations and behavior of the two Pioneers during their entire missions, including descriptions of various data formats and techniques used for their navigation and radio-science data analysis. As most of this information was recovered relatively recently, it was not used in the previous studies of the Pioneer anomaly, but it is critical for the new investigation.Comment: 165 pages, 40 figures, 16 tables; accepted for publication in Living Reviews in Relativit

f(R) theories

Over the past decade, f(R) theories have been extensively studied as one of the simplest modifications to General Relativity. In this article we review various applications of f(R) theories to cosmology and gravity - such as inflation, dark energy, local gravity constraints, cosmological perturbations, and spherically symmetric solutions in weak and strong gravitational backgrounds. We present a number of ways to distinguish those theories from General Relativity observationally and experimentally. We also discuss the extension to other modified gravity theories such as Brans-Dicke theory and Gauss-Bonnet gravity, and address models that can satisfy both cosmological and local gravity constraints.Comment: 156 pages, 14 figures, Invited review article in Living Reviews in Relativity, Published version, Comments are welcom

AutoRoot: open-source software employing a novel image analysis approach to support fully-automated plant phenotyping

Background: Computer-based phenotyping of plants has risen in importance in recent years. Whilst much software has been written to aid phenotyping using image analysis, to date the vast majority has been only semi-automatic. However, such interaction is not desirable in high throughput approaches. Here, we present a system designed to analyse plant images in a completely automated manner, allowing genuine high throughput measurement of root traits. To do this we introduce a new set of proxy traits. Results: We test the system on a new, automated image capture system, the Microphenotron, which is able to image many 1000s of roots/h. A simple experiment is presented, treating the plants with differing chemical conditions to produce different phenotypes. The automated imaging setup and the new software tool was used to measure proxy traits in each well. A correlation matrix was calculated across automated and manual measures, as a validation. Some particular proxy measures are very highly correlated with the manual measures (e.g. proxy length to manual length, r2 > 0.9). This suggests that while the automated measures are not directly equivalent to classic manual measures, they can be used to indicate phenotypic differences (hence the term, proxy). In addition, the raw discriminative power of the new proxy traits was examined. Principal component analysis was calculated across all proxy measures over two phenotypically-different groups of plants. Many of the proxy traits can be used to separate the data in the two conditions. Conclusion: The new proxy traits proposed tend to correlate well with equivalent manual measures, where these exist. Additionally, the new measures display strong discriminative power. It is suggested that for particular phenotypic differences, different traits will be relevant, and not all will have meaningful manual equivalent measures. However, approaches such as PCA can be used to interrogate the resulting data to identify differences between datasets. Select images can then be carefully manually inspected if the nature of the precise differences is required. We suggest such flexible measurement approaches are necessary for fully automated, high throughput systems such as the Microphenotron

Economic impact of infections and antibiotics

In this chapter, we review several aspects with respect to the burden of infectious diseases, its impact in morbidity and mortality, and its economic burden. Furthermore, we referenced the actual situation with relation to the use of antimicrobial, the resistance problem and misuse of antibiotic, and the economic impact in the health systems

Measurement of the Bottom-Strange Meson Mixing Phase in the Full CDF Data Set

We report a measurement of the bottom-strange meson mixing phase \beta_s using the time evolution of B0_s -> J/\psi (->\mu+\mu-) \phi (-> K+ K-) decays in which the quark-flavor content of the bottom-strange meson is identified at production. This measurement uses the full data set of proton-antiproton collisions at sqrt(s)= 1.96 TeV collected by the Collider Detector experiment at the Fermilab Tevatron, corresponding to 9.6 fb-1 of integrated luminosity. We report confidence regions in the two-dimensional space of \beta_s and the B0_s decay-width difference \Delta\Gamma_s, and measure \beta_s in [-\pi/2, -1.51] U [-0.06, 0.30] U [1.26, \pi/2] at the 68% confidence level, in agreement with the standard model expectation. Assuming the standard model value of \beta_s, we also determine \Delta\Gamma_s = 0.068 +- 0.026 (stat) +- 0.009 (syst) ps-1 and the mean B0_s lifetime, \tau_s = 1.528 +- 0.019 (stat) +- 0.009 (syst) ps, which are consistent and competitive with determinations by other experiments.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures, Phys. Rev. Lett 109, 171802 (2012

Improvdent: Improving dentures for patient benefit. A crossover randomised clinical trial comparing impression materials for complete dentures.

Background According to the UK Adult Dental Health Survey (2009) 15% of adults aged 65–74, 30% aged 75–84 and 47% aged >85 years are edentulous and require complete dentures. Patients’ quality of life and nutrition status are affected by poor dentures. The quality of the dental impression is the most important issue for improving the fit and comfort of new dentures. There is paucity of RCT evidence for which impression material is best for complete dentures construction. This study aims to compare two impression materials for effectiveness and cost effectiveness. Methods/Design IMPROVDENT is a double-blind crossover trial comparing the use of alginate and silicone, two commonly used denture impression materials, in terms of patient preference and cost-effectiveness. Eighty five edentulous patients will be recruited and provided with two sets of dentures, similar in all aspects except for the impression material used (alginate or silicone). Patients will try both sets of dentures for a two-week period, unadjusted, to become accustomed to the feel of the new dentures (habituation period). Patients will then wear each set of dentures for a period of 8 weeks (in random order) during which time the dentures will be adjusted for optimum comfort. Finally, patients will be given both sets of dentures for a further two weeks to wear whichever denture they prefer (confirmation period). Patients will be asked about quality of life and to rate dentures on function and comfort at the end of each trial period and asked which set they prefer at the end of the habituation period (unadjusted denture preference) and confirmation period (adjusted denture preference). A health economic evaluation will estimate incremental cost-effectiveness ratios of producing dentures from the two materials. A qualitative study will investigate the impact of dentures on behaviour and quality of life. Funding: IMPROVDENT is funded by NIHR RfPB (PB-PG-0408-16300). Discussion This trial aims to provide evidence on the costs and quality of dentures cast from two different commonly used impression materials; the intention is to significantly impact on the quality of denture production within NHS dentistry

Enzymatic capacities of metabolic fuel use in cuttlefish (Sepia officinalis) and responses to food deprivation: insight into the metabolic organization and starvation survival strategy of cephalopods

Food limitation is a common challenge for animals. Cephalopods are sensitive to starvation because of high metabolic rates and growth rates related to their "live fast, die young" life history. We investigated how enzymatic capacities of key metabolic pathways are modulated during starvation in the common cuttlefish (Sepia officinalis) to gain insight into the metabolic organization of cephalopods and their strategies for coping with food limitation. In particular, lipids have traditionally been considered unimportant fuels in cephalopods, yet, puzzlingly, many species (including cuttlefish) mobilize the lipid stores in their digestive gland during starvation. Using a comprehensive multi-tissue assay of enzymatic capacities for energy metabolism, we show that, during long-term starvation (12 days), glycolytic capacity for glucose use is decreased in cuttlefish tissues, while capacities for use of lipid-based fuels (fatty acids and ketone bodies) and amino acid fuels are retained or increased. Specifically, the capacity to use the ketone body acetoacetate as fuel is widespread across tissues and gill has a previously unrecognized capacity for fatty acid catabolism, albeit at low rates. The capacity for de novo glucose synthesis (gluconeogenesis), important for glucose homeostasis, likely is restricted to the digestive gland, contrary to previous reports of widespread gluconeogenesis among cephalopod tissues. Short-term starvation (3-5 days) had few effects on enzymatic capacities. Similar to vertebrates, lipid-based fuels, putatively mobilized from fat stores in the digestive gland, appear to be important energy sources for cephalopods, especially during starvation when glycolytic capacity is decreased perhaps to conserve available glucose

Search for new phenomena in final states with an energetic jet and large missing transverse momentum in pp collisions at √ s = 8 TeV with the ATLAS detector

Results of a search for new phenomena in final states with an energetic jet and large missing transverse momentum are reported. The search uses 20.3 fb−1 of √ s = 8 TeV data collected in 2012 with the ATLAS detector at the LHC. Events are required to have at least one jet with pT > 120 GeV and no leptons. Nine signal regions are considered with increasing missing transverse momentum requirements between Emiss T > 150 GeV and Emiss T > 700 GeV. Good agreement is observed between the number of events in data and Standard Model expectations. The results are translated into exclusion limits on models with either large extra spatial dimensions, pair production of weakly interacting dark matter candidates, or production of very light gravitinos in a gauge-mediated supersymmetric model. In addition, limits on the production of an invisibly decaying Higgs-like boson leading to similar topologies in the final state are presente