Analysis the Application of E-business for the Tourism Enterprises’ Performance Evaluation in China

AbstractToday the internet provides, at modest cost, an unprecedented level of connectivity and the ability to communicate efficiently and effectively directly with customers. The emergence of the internet has led to the rapid growth of ebusiness, and this had an effect on the business of the tourism enterprises. One of the crucial issues in the e-business is to provide an appropriate level of quality of tourism service. E-business service providers strive to provide qualitybased services by investing significant amount of money and resources in the e-business technologies such as web design, user interfaces, advertisement, security and reliability, and web server performance. In this paper the research focuses on the performance of e-business for the application to the tourism enterprises. As is known to all, performance of the tourism enterprises plays a key role in the provision of quality-based services. A number of solutions have been proposed to improve the performance of e-business services for tourism consumers to purchase the tourism product and tourism service.© 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and peer-review under responsibility of RIUD

Gallic acid-grafted chitosan films as antioxidant food packaging

Chitosan is the second most abundant natural polysaccharide in the nature. Due to its biodegradability and film forming ability, chitosan has the potential to be used as an alternative to petroleum-based polymers for food packaging. The presence of a primary amine as well as primary and secondary hydroxyl groups enable chitosan to be chemically modified with various functional groups. Gallic acid (GA) is a natural occurring antioxidant (AOX), which can be grafted to chitosan using by 1-ethyl-3-(3-dimethylaminopropyl) carbodiimide (EDC) and N-hydroxysuccinimide (NHS). The first project deals with the effect of ethanol (EtOH) concentration on efficiency of grafting GA onto chitosan. Using pure deionized water as a sole solvent (0% EtOH), GA grafted to chitosan at the largest extent (285.9 mg GA/g chitosan). As the concentration of EtOH increased, the grafting efficiency proportionally decreased. The nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) studies showed that the higher alcohol concentration inhibited successful grafting of GA by prohibiting the conversion of the intermediate O-acylisourea ester to the expected intermediate NHS-ester. To assist the NMR studies of solvent effect on grafting, the formation of GA-NHS ester was investigated in the second study by quantitative 1H (proton) NMR reaction monitoring. Using a recently developed long-range heteronuclear single quantum multiple bond correlation (LR-HSQMBC),we were able to visualize a 5JCH (five-bond carbon-proton coupling) that confirmed the structure of the GA-NHS ester. The data showed that during grafting, a side reaction of crosslinking can occur as the hydroxyl groups of chitosan can be activated by EDC and coupled to the amino groups. In order to prevent the decreased solubility of chitosan caused by crosslinking, surface modification was introduced directly to chitosan films. The surface grafting was conducted utilizing EDC and NHS and was confirmed by FTIR. Surface grafted GA-chitosan films exhibited excellent AOX activity, assessed as 2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) scavenging efficiency and reducing power. When used as packaging material, the surface-grafted chitosan films had similar or better effect as polyethylene films protecting sunflower seeds from lipid oxidation. Overall, this research has developed surface-grafted GA-chitosan films with excellent antioxidant efficiency that may be utilized as multifunctional biodegradable food packaging material

Water Interaction with Microporous Coordination Polymers: Energy Efficient Dehumidification, Antimatter Probing and Polymer Coating.

Microporous coordination polymers (MCPs) are most typically built from rigid ligands and arrays of metals/metal clusters resulting in the formation of crystalline materials; in many cases these materials are highly porous. The chemical and structural features are easily controlled in MCPs thus offering significant potential for their development as application-specific, high performance materials. However, commercial applications of MCPs have been slow to develop and one often cited barrier to applications for some MCPs is their instability against moisture. This thesis focuses on application-oriented investigation of the interaction between water and MCPs: MCPs have been intensively studied as practical industrially viable sorbents for gas dehumidification, MCP porosity evolution during water degradation has been elucidated by positronium annihilation lifetime spectroscopy (PALS), and a hybrid polymer@MCP composite with increased water stability has been studied. MCPs are demonstrated here to be efficient desiccants for the dehumidification of air and comparison of their capacity, regenerability and efficiency with commercial activated alumina is conducted. Complete regeneration using dry air with mild heating is achieved. The achievement of high water adsorption capacity coupled to gentle regeneration indicates that gas dehumidification may be an important application for MCPs. The details of MCPs structural collapse caused by water with regard to pore size evolution are acquired by incorporating a flow-through system in tandem with PALS. From the decrease in porosity, we have observed an induction period for water degradation of some Zn4O-based MCPs that signals much greater stability than commonly believed to be possible. The sigmoidal trend in the degradation curve of unfunctionalized MCPs caused by water vapor has been established. The water sensitivity of Zn4O-based MCPs is found to be structure and history dependent. A hybrid polymer@MCP architecture is examined, which interfaces hard (crystalline) MCP, MOF-5, and soft (amorphous) polymers, polystyrene, to form polystyrene@MOF-5 in which polystyrene chains are uniformly tethered to the outer shell of MOF-5. Control over the position of polymer initiation and the thickness of the polymer coating is achieved by IRMOF-3@MOF-5 core-shell arrangement. The polystyrene@MOF-5 demonstrates an increase in the kinetic stability when subjected to humid environments.PHDChemistryUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/111421/1/pingguo_1.pd