A sweetness sensor with lipid/polymer membranes has been developed for evaluating the sweetness of sugars and sugar alcohols. Among the constituents of lipid/polymer membranes, gallic acid has been used as the main substance involved in sucrose response in our group. In this study, as a step toward understanding the response mechanism of the sweetness sensor, functional groups of gallic acid, namely, carboxyl and hydroxyl groups, were focused on. The results demonstrated that the carboxyl group is essential for the sweetness sensor, whereas the hydroxyl group is not always necessary for the sucrose response. It was also revealed that the phosphate group may be a substitute for the carboxyl group. Then, for one of the sensors with the highest response to a 300 mM sucrose solution, named the sweetness sensor GL1, the basic characteristics such as selectivity and correlation with sweetness were investigated. The behavior of GL1 sensor outputs was relatively similar to the sweetness perception in humans.
For the efficient transfer of skills from expert workers to inexperienced ones, it is necessary to analyze their performance. In the present study, we evaluated the skills of workers at the process of glass forming, wherein the workers heat up a glass cylinder with fire and form glasses into different shapes. In the process, workers are required to rotate a glass cylinder over a gas burner for uniformly heating up the glass. Three workers with different skill levels performed two different tasks stretching a glass cylinder and expanding the end of a glass cylinder into a funnel shape were monitored using video cameras and an infrared thermograph. These workers also performed the task of rotating a glass cylinder, in which five inexperienced workers also participated in. Results indicate that, by stably rotating the glass cylinder, an expert worker can increase the production rate and the quality of the products. Moreover, the stability of rotation showed a positive correlation with the stability of finger movements of the worker. A further analysis of the finger movements suggests that dexterity and a unique way of holding the glass cylinder enables the expert worker to smoothly and stably rotate the glass cylinder.
Metal plasma‐facing materials (PFMs) are expected to be candidates for future fusion power plants from the view point of tritium retention. The purpose of this study is to develop a model including a long timescale plasma interaction with metal PFMs. As a first step, we have developed a simple zero‐dimensional (0D) model, which consists of particle balance equations for the following three different particle species: (a) hydrogen plasma (elec., H+, H2+, H3+), (b) neutral hydrogen atoms (H) and molecules (H2) in the gas phase, and (c) the wall‐stored H atoms. The model has been applied to simulate long‐term operation in the limiter configuration of the QUEST tokamak. Modelling results of the long time evolution of the H atom wall inventory reasonably reproduce the experimental tendency. Although the present model is relatively simple, it is useful to understand the basic characteristics of overall plasma particle balance, the density control of the main plasma, and the H atom wall inventory for long‐term tokamak operation.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.