ELCA (Switzerland)

ResumenSe desarrolló una nueva configuración de la técnica columna de longitud cero (ZLC), que permite utilizar las diferentes variantes de cromatografía para determinar de forma rápida los coeficientes de difusión e isotermas de componentes puros y mezclas en tamices moleculares.El innovador diseño permite realizar todos los estudios en una sola muestra facilitando el uso de los parámetros en modelos teóricos o simulaciones moleculares.Una de las características clave del nuevo sistema es que es posible llevar a cabo el proceso de adsorción y separación de olefinas y parafinas mediante el uso de 5 a 15 mg de adsorbente.Por medio de dos detectores de ionización de llama es posible determinar la composición a la salida de ambas columnas y estudiar los perfiles de desorción.A través de dos válvulas de 4 y 6 vías que se comunican con dos pares de controladores de flujo másico, se diseñó una configuración para mediciones cinéticas y al equilibrio.Mediante la ayuda del software LabVIEW y las tarjetas DAQ se gestionó todo el proceso experimental.La nueva configuración de ZLC se aplicó para estudiar la adsorción y separación de CH4 y C2H6 en la zeolita 5A, con los cuales se validó la nueva configuración experimental.

Laminated composites are widely used in applications when a high strength-to-weight ratio is required. Aeronautic, naval and automotive industries use these materials to reduce the weight of the vehicles and, consequently, fuel consumption. However, the fiber-reinforced laminated materials are anisotropic and the elastic properties can vary widely due to non-standardized manufacturing processes. The elastic characterization using mechanical tests is not easy, destructive and, in most cases, not all the elastic constants can be obtained. Therefore, alternative techniques are required to assure the quality of the mechanical parts and the evaluation of new materials. In this work, the implementation of the ultrasonic through-transmission technique and the characterization of some engineering materials is reported. Isotropic materials and laminated composites of carbon fiber and glass fiber in a polymer matrix were characterized by ultrasound and mechanical tests. An improved methodology for the transit time delay calculation is reported.

Equipped with state-of-the-art smartphones and mobile devices, today's highly interconnected urban population is increasingly dependent on these gadgets to organize and plan their daily lives. These applications often rely on current (or preferred) locations of individual users or a group of users to provide the desired service, which jeopardizes their privacy; users do not necessarily want to reveal their current (or preferred) locations to the service provider or to other, possibly untrusted, users. In this paper, we propose privacy-preserving algorithms for determining an optimal meeting location for a group of users. We perform a thorough privacy evaluation by formally quantifying privacy-loss of the proposed approaches. In order to study the performance of our algorithms in a real deployment, we implement and test their execution efficiency on Nokia smartphones. By means of a targeted user-study, we attempt to get an insight into the privacy-awareness of users in location-based services and the usability of the proposed solutions.

The cryptographic hash functions BLAKE and Skein are built from the ChaCha stream cipher and the tweakable Threefish block cipher, respectively. Interestingly enough, they are based on the same arithmetic operations, and the same design philosophy allows one to design lightweight coprocessors for hashing and encryption. The key element of our approach is to take advantage of the parallelism of the algorithms considered in this work to deeply pipeline our Arithmetic and Logic Units, and to avoid data dependencies by interleaving independent tasks. We show for instance that a fully autonomous implementation of BLAKE and ChaCha on a Xilinx Virtex-6 device occupies 144 slices and three memory blocks, and achieves competitive throughputs. In order to offer the same features, a coprocessor implementing Skein and Threefish requires a substantial higher slice count.

Are cultural differences considered when techniques for treating the mentally ill are planned? A program that does pay attention to these differences is benefiting Spanish-speaking mental patients in a state hospital in Greater Los Angeles.