Mechanochemical Synthesis of CPM‐5: A Green Method

The development of green technologies for the manufacture of various materials is considered as one of the approaches to address some of the environmental issues of commercializing new materials. A mechanochemical (MC) method is developed to synthesize crystalline porous material‐5 (CPM‐5). The effect of different mechanical parameters, including oscillation frequency and time and the number of metal balls used for milling is studied. Results revealed that CPM‐5 crystals are successfully formed under optimized conditions. It was noted that the thermal treatment of the samples after grinding is very crucial for the formation of CPM‐5 under the studied conditions. Moreover, washing of samples with a 1:1 solution of dimethylformamide (DMF):H₂O remarkably enhanced the surface area of the final product.     

Herd immunity acquired indirectly from interactions between the ecology of infectious diseases,demography and economics

Patterns of morbidity and mortality around the globe are determined by interactions between infectious diseases and systematic human socioeconomic processes. The most obvious of these patterns is that the greatest burdens of infectious diseases are found among the poor, who lack the basic resources for disease prevention and treatment. Yet, it is becoming increasingly clear that many infectious diseases are themselves causes of poverty owing to their effects on labour productivity. A particularly subtle phenomenon that receives little attention in the epidemiology literature and is especially important for poor communities is the role of the birth rate as an important direct cause of high disease burdens. Because of their high rates of transmission and life-long immunity, the persistence of many child diseases such as measles relies on high rates of reproduction as their source of susceptible individuals. Thus, there are significant direct health benefits of lower fertility rates, which are further enhanced by interactions with economic processes. Indeed, fertility, poverty and disease all interact with each other in important and predictable ways that can be built into traditional disease ecology models. We present such a model here that provides insights into the long-term effect of policy interventions. For example, because of indirect income effects, herd immunity may be acquired with lower vaccine coverage than previously thought. Reductions in the disease burden can also occur through lower fertility. Our model thus provides a disease ecology framework that is useful for the analysis of demographic transitions.     

Decreasing stochasticity through enhanced seasonality in measles epidemics

Seasonal changes in the environment are known to be important drivers of population dynamics, giving rise to sustained population cycles. However, it is often difficult to measure the strength and shape of seasonal forces affecting populations. In recent years, statistical time-series methods have been applied to the incidence records of childhood infectious diseases in an attempt to estimate seasonal variation in transmission rates, as driven by the pattern of school terms. In turn, school-term forcing was used to show how susceptible influx rates affect the interepidemic period. In this paper, we document the response of measles dynamics to distinct shifts in the parameter regime using previously unexplored records of measles mortality from the early decades of the twentieth century. We describe temporal patterns of measles epidemics using spectral analysis techniques, and point out a marked decrease in birth rates over time. Changes in host demography alone do not, however, suffice to explain epidemiological transitions. By fitting the time-series susceptible–infected–recovered model to measles mortality data, we obtain estimates of seasonal transmission in different eras, and find that seasonality increased over time. This analysis supports theoretical work linking complex population dynamics and the balance between stochastic and deterministic forces as determined by the strength of seasonality.     

Extended kalman filter based nonlinear geometric control of a seeded batch cooling crystallizer

A nonlinear dynamic model of a seeded potash alum batch cooling crystallizer is presented. The model of the batch crystallizer is based on the conservation principles of mass, energy and population. In order to maintain constant supersaturation, a nonlinear geometric feedback controller is implemented. It is shown that compared to a natural and a simplified optimal cooling policies, the nonlinear geometric control (NCC) leads to a substantial improvement of the final crystal quality. An extended Kalman filter (EKF) is used as a closed loop observer for this nonlinear system to predict the non‐measurable state variables. It is found that the EKF is capable of effectively predicting the first four leading moments of the population density function. The effectiveness of the EKF based nonlinear geometric controller in the presence of plant/model mismatch is also studied. Simulation results show that the EKF based nonlinear geometric controller is reasonably robust in the presence of modeling error.     

Cascade closed-loop optimization and control of batch reactors

In this paper, a cascade closed-loop optimization and control strategy for batch reactors is proposed. Based on the reduction of a physical conservation model a cascade system is developed, which can effectively combine optimization and control to achieve good on-line optimization and tracking performance under the common condition where incomplete knowledge of the reaction system exists. A two-tier estimation scheme using a nonlinear observer for heat production rate and reaction rates is also developed. In the reaction rate estimation, calorimetric information is used. The on-line closed-loop optimization strategy uses a descending horizon dynamic optimization algorithm based on nonlinear programming and an additive unknown disturbance for feedback. A simple adaptive nonlinear tracking system is designed based on the generic model control concept. The efficiency of this strategy is demonstrated through simulations on a batch reactor under various operation conditions, such as noisy measurements, varying initial states and model mismatch.     

Large-Strain Generalization of Microplane Model for Concrete and Application

The formulation of the microplane model for concrete and development of model M4 in the three preceding companion papers in this study is here extended to large strains. After giving examples of certain difficulties with the second Piola-Kirchhoff stress tensor in the modeling of strength and frictional limits on weak planes within the material, the back-rotated Cauchy (true) tensor is introduced as the stress measure. The strain tensor conjugate to the back-rotated Cauchy (or Kirchhoff) stress tensor is unsuitable because it is nonholonomic (i.e., path-dependent) and because its microplane components do not characterize meaningful deformation measures. Therefore Green's Lagrangian tensor is adopted, even though it is not conjugate. Only for this strain measure do the microplane components of the strain tensor suffice to characterize the normal stretch and shear angle on that microplane. Using such nonconjugate strain and stress tensors is admissible because, for concrete, the elastic parts of strains as well as the total volumetric strains are always small, and because the algorithm used guarantees the energy dissipation by large inelastic strains to be nonnegative. Examples of dynamic structural analysis are given.