Synchrotron X-ray microtomography and multifractal analysis for the characterization of pore structure and distribution in softwood pellet biochar

Biochar pores in the micrometer range (1–100 µm) derive from cellular structures of the plant biomass subjected to pyrolysis or can be the result of mechanical processing, such as pelleting. In this study, synchrotron X-ray microtomography was used to investigate the internal pore structure of softwood pellet biochar produced by slow pyrolysis at 550 and 700 °C. The microtomographic data sets consisted of 2025 images of 2560 × 2560 voxels with a voxel side length of 0.87 µm. The three-dimensional reconstructions revealed that pelleting and pyrolysis significantly altered the pore structures of the wood feedstock, creating a network of connected pores between fragments that resembled the wood morphology. While higher pyrolysis temperature increased the specific surface area (as determined by BET nitrogen adsorption), it did not affect the total observed porosity. Multifractal analysis was applied to assess the characteristics of the frequency distribution of pores along each of the three dimensions of reconstructed images of five softwood pellet biochar samples. The resulting singularity and Rényi spectra (generalized dimensions) indicated that the distribution of porosity had monofractal scaling behavior, was homogeneous within the analyzed volumes and consistent between replicate samples. Moreover, the pore distributions were isotropic (direction-independent), which is in strong contrast with the anisotropic pore structure of wood. As pores at the scale analyzed in this study are relevant, for example, for the supply of plant accessible water and habitable space for microorganisms, our findings combined with the ability to reproduce biochar with such pore distribution offer substantial advantages in various biochar applications.</p

Science, Technology and Love in Late Eighteenth-Century Opera

It is a tale told by countless operas: young love, thwarted by an old man’s financially motivated marriage plans, triumphs in the end thanks to a deception that tricks the old man into blessing the young lovers’ union. Always a doddering fool, the old man is often also an enthusiast for knowledge. Such is the case, for instance, in Carlo Goldoni’s comic opera libretto Il mondo della luna (1750), in which Buonafede’s interest in the moon opens him to an elaborate hoax that has him believe he and his daughters have left Earth for the lunar world; and also in the Singspiel Die Luftbälle, oder der Liebhaber à la Montgolfier (1788), wherein the apothecary Wurm trades Sophie, the ward he intended to marry himself, for a technological innovation that will make him a pioneering aeronaut

Vocal Culture in the Age of Laryngoscopy

For several months beginning in 1884, readers of Life, Science, Health, the Atlantic Monthly and similar magazines would have encountered half-page advertisements for a newly patented medical device called the ‘ammoniaphone’ (Figure 2.1). Invented and promoted by a Scottish doctor named Carter Moffat and endorsed by the soprano Adelina Patti, British Prime Minister William Gladstone and the Princess of Wales, the ammoniaphone promised a miraculous transformation in the voices of its users. It was recommended for ‘vocalists, clergymen, public speakers, parliamentary men, readers, reciters, lecturers, leaders of psalmody, schoolmasters, amateurs, church choirs, barristers, and all persons who have to use their voices professionally, or who desire to greatly improve their speaking or singing tones’. Some estimates indicated that Moffat sold upwards of 30,000 units, yet the ammoniaphone was a flash in the pan as far as such things go, fading from public view after 1886

Unsound Seeds

With this image of a curtain hiding and at the same time heightening some terrible secret, Max Kalbeck began his review of the first Viennese performance of Richard Strauss’s Salome. Theodor W. Adorno picked up the image of the curtain in the context of Strauss’s fabled skill at composing non-musical events, when he identified the opening flourish of Strauss’s Salome as the swooshing sound of the rising curtain. If this is so, the succès de scandale of the opera was achieved, in more than one sense, as soon as the curtain rose at Dresden’s Semperoper on 10 December 1905. Critics of the premiere noted that the opera set ‘boundless wildness and degeneration to music’; it brought ‘high decadence’ onto the operatic stage; a ‘composition of hysteria’, reflecting the ‘disease of our time’, Salome is ‘hardly music any more’.The outrage did not end there

Opera and Hypnosis: Victor Maurel’s Experiments with Verdi’s Otello

One day in his private home on the avenue Bugeaud, in Paris’s sixteenth arrondissement, the famous baritone Victor Maurel hosted a meeting which combined music with hypnotism of a young woman

Operatic Fantasies in Early Nineteenth-Century Psychiatry

In his celebrated essay on insanity in the Dictionnaire des sciences médicales (1816), French psychiatrist Étienne Esquirol marvelled at the earlier custom of allowing asylum inmates to attend theatrical productions at Charenton

PR in change : Social Media in professional sports Using the example of the hockey club Eisbären Berlin

Die Entwicklung des Social Webs wird von dem ein oder anderen mit der Erfindung des Buchdrucks verglichen, sogar als eine Art der Revolution angesehen. Revolution heißt Veränderungen und diese haben die Sozialen Medien in den unterschiedlichsten Bereichen mit sich gebracht. So auch in der PR-Arbeit von Sport-Organisationen. Wie es Social-Media-Anwendungen schaffen, neue Aufgabenbereiche im Bereich der PR-Arbeit zu kreieren und damit auch neue Möglichkeiten und Chancen für Sport-Organisationen, soll am Beispiel des Eishockey-Clubs Eisbären Berlin in dieser Arbeit deutlich gemacht werden. Zusätzlich soll eine quantitative und einer qualitative Untersuchung der Social-Media-Aktivitäten der Eisbären Berlin Rückschlüsse liefern, wie der Eishockeyclub die neuen Möglichkeiten und Chancen des Social Webs möglicherweise besser ausschöpfen kann