Development of Grid e-Infrastructure in South-Eastern Europe

Over the period of 6 years and three phases, the SEE-GRID programme has established a strong regional human network in the area of distributed scientific computing and has set up a powerful regional Grid infrastructure. It attracted a number of user communities and applications from diverse fields from countries throughout the South-Eastern Europe. From the infrastructure point view, the first project phase has established a pilot Grid infrastructure with more than 20 resource centers in 11 countries. During the subsequent two phases of the project, the infrastructure has grown to currently 55 resource centers with more than 6600 CPUs and 750 TBs of disk storage, distributed in 16 participating countries. Inclusion of new resource centers to the existing infrastructure, as well as a support to new user communities, has demanded setup of regionally distributed core services, development of new monitoring and operational tools, and close collaboration of all partner institution in managing such a complex infrastructure. In this paper we give an overview of the development and current status of SEE-GRID regional infrastructure and describe its transition to the NGI-based Grid model in EGI, with the strong SEE regional collaboration.Comment: 22 pages, 12 figures, 4 table

The First 1 1/2 Years of TOTEM Roman Pot Operation at LHC

Since the LHC running season 2010, the TOTEM Roman Pots (RPs) are fully operational and serve for collecting elastic and diffractive proton-proton scattering data. Like for other moveable devices approaching the high intensity LHC beams, a reliable and precise control of the RP position is critical to machine protection. After a review of the RP movement control and position interlock system, the crucial task of alignment will be discussed.Comment: 3 pages, 6 figures; 2nd International Particle Accelerator Conference (IPAC 2011), San Sebastian, Spain; contribution MOPO01

Spectrophotometric determination of carbon dioxide and sulphur dioxide in wines by flow injection

Flow injection analysis (FIA) methods for the spectrophotometric determination of CO2 and SO2 in wines are described. The determination of CO2 is based on the colour change of a low capacity buffer (containing an acid-base indicator) due to the dissolved carbon dioxide. The determination of SO2 is based on the decoloration of malachite green by sulphur dioxide. Two FIA manifolds are presented; one for the determination of CO2 in sparkling wines and another for the simultaneous determination of CO2 and SO2 in table wines. The analytes are isolated inside the manifold from the sample matrix using gas-diffusion units. Regression equations (FIA versus reference methods) showed no statistical difference, at 95 % confidence level, between the two sets of results for both determinations; additionally, for the determination of CO2, recovery values between 93.5 % and 111 % were found. RSD lower than 4.5 % for SO2 and 2.4 % for the CO2 determination were found. The sampling rates achieved were: 30 h–1 for the uniparametric system and 40 h–1 for the biparametric system. The single determination manifold is applicable in the concentration ranges of 0.5 to 4 g L–1 of CO2, and the simultaneous determination manifold in the range of 0.25 to 3 g L–1 of CO2 and 0.05 to 0.3 g L–1 of SO

Additive generators based on generalized arithmetic operators in interval-valued fuzzy and Atanassov's intuitionistic fuzzy set theory

In this paper we investigate additive generators in Atanassov's intuitionistic fuzzy and interval-valued fuzzy set theory. Starting from generalized arithmetic operators satisfying some axioms we define additive generators and we characterize continuous generators which map exact elements to exact elements in terms of generators on the unit interval. We give necessary and sufficient condition under which a generator actually generates a t-nporm and we show that the generated t-norm belongs to particular classes of t-norms depending on the arithmetic operators involved in the defintion of the generator

PHOTOELECTROCHEMICAL CHOLESTEROL BIOSENSING VIA P(SNS-NH 2 )/CHOX/[RU(BPY) 3 ] 2+ MODIFIED ELECTRODES

ABSTRACT Despite the numerous studies on photochemically induced electron transfer in proteins 1 , there is no precedence for the photonic wiring of redox enzymes with electrodes and their bioelectrocatalytic activation. The use of enzymes in fuel-generating solar cells has been discussed previously 2 . The electrical wiring of the enzymes in these systems was achieved, however, by applying natural cofactors (nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (phosphate)) and their regeneration by photochemical means 3 . Also, the field of enzyme-based biofuel cells has been substantially advanced in the past decade, and numerous organic materials, such as alcohols, sugars, or ahydroxy acids, have been used as fuels for the biocatalyzed generation of electrical power in the presence of oxyge

Synergizing Fe₂O₃ nanoparticles on single atom Fe-N-C for nitrate reduction to ammonia at industrial current densities

The electrochemical reduction of nitrates (NO3−) enables a pathway for the carbon neutral synthesis of ammonia (NH3), via the nitrate reduction reaction (NO3RR), which has been demonstrated at high selectivity. However, to make NH3 synthesis cost-competitive with current technologies, high NH3 partial current densities (jNH3) must be achieved to reduce the levelized cost of NH3. Here, the high NO3RR activity of Fe-based materials is leveraged to synthesize a novel active particle-active support system with Fe2O3 nanoparticles supported on atomically dispersed Fe–N–C. The optimized 3×Fe2O3/Fe–N–C catalyst demonstrates an ultrahigh NO3RR activity, reaching a maximum jNH3 of 1.95 A cm−2 at a Faradaic efficiency (FE) for NH3 of 100% and an NH3 yield rate over 9 mmol hr−1 cm−2. Operando XANES and post-mortem XPS reveal the importance of a pre-reduction activation step, reducing the surface Fe2O3 (Fe3+) to highly active Fe0 sites, which are maintained during electrolysis. Durability studies demonstrate the robustness of both the Fe2O3 particles and Fe–Nx sites at highly cathodic potentials, maintaining a current of −1.3 A cm−2 over 24 hours. This work exhibits an effective and durable active particle-active support system enhancing the performance of the NO3RR, enabling industrially relevant current densities and near 100% selectivity

Elucidating electrochemical nitrate and nitrite reduction over atomically-dispersed transition metal sites

Electrocatalytic reduction of waste nitrates (NO3−) enables the synthesis of ammonia (NH3) in a carbon neutral and decentralized manner. Atomically dispersed metal-nitrogen-carbon (M-N-C) catalysts demonstrate a high catalytic activity and uniquely favor mono-nitrogen products. However, the reaction fundamentals remain largely underexplored. Herein, we report a set of 14; 3d-, 4d-, 5d- and f-block M-N-C catalysts. The selectivity and activity of NO3− reduction to NH3 in neutral media, with a specific focus on deciphering the role of the NO2− intermediate in the reaction cascade, reveals strong correlations (R=0.9) between the NO2− reduction activity and NO3− reduction selectivity for NH3. Moreover, theoretical computations reveal the associative/dissociative adsorption pathways for NO2− evolution, over the normal M-N4 sites and their oxo-form (O-M-N4) for oxyphilic metals. This work provides a platform for designing multi-element NO3RR cascades with single-atom sites or their hybridization with extended catalytic surfaces