Desenvolupament de metodologia analítica per a la determinació de glifosat i adjuvants

El glifosat és un herbicida no selectiu àmpliament utilitzat en cultius agrícoles i zones no agrícoles que requereixen un control de la vegetació. Tot i la baixa toxicitat del glifosat en si mateix, la seva aplicació es realitza emprant formulacions comercials que contenen substàncies auxiliars que milloren l'eficàcia de l'herbicida, però modifiquen la toxicitat del producte final.Aquest treball s'ha centrat en la determinació de components de formulacions comercials d'herbicides i el seu comportament en el sòl. La primera part del treball s'ha dedicat al desenvolupament de mètodes d'anàlisi per a la determinació de glifosat i el seu principal metabòlit, AMPA, en matrius aquoses i sòls. A continuació s'ha desenvolupat un mètode d'anàlisi per les substàncies auxiliars addicionades freqüentment en les formulacions comercials, tensioactius no iònics. Finalment s'ha estudiat la mobilitat de l'herbicida en sòls de la zona mediterrània, incidint en els processos d'adsorció i degradació. També s'ha comparat el comportament de diversos herbicides comercials que contenen glifosat.

A systematic and feasible method for computing nuclear contributions to electrical properties of polyatomic molecules

An analytic method to evaluate nuclear contributions to electrical properties of polyatomic molecules is presented. Such contributions control changes induced by an electric field on equilibrium geometry (nuclear relaxation contribution) and vibrational motion (vibrational contribution) of a molecular system. Expressions to compute the nuclear contributions have been derived from a power series expansion of the potential energy. These contributions to the electrical properties are given in terms of energy derivatives with respect to normal coordinates, electric field intensity or both. Only one calculation of such derivatives at the field-free equilibrium geometry is required. To show the useful efficiency of the analytical evaluation of electrical properties (the so-called AEEP method), results for calculations on water and pyridine at the SCF/TZ2P and the MP2/TZ2P levels of theory are reported. The results obtained are compared with previous theoretical calculations and with experimental values

Enhanced convolution approach for CAC in ATM networks, an analytical study and implementation

The characteristics of service independence and flexibility of ATM networks make the control problems of such networks very critical. One of the main challenges in ATM networks is to design traffic control mechanisms that enable both economically efficient use of the network resources and desired quality of service to higher layer applications. Window flow control mechanisms of traditional packet switched networks are not well suited to real time services, at the speeds envisaged for the future networks. In this work, the utilisation of the Probability of Congestion (PC) as a bandwidth decision parameter is presented. The validity of PC utilisation is compared with QOS parameters in buffer-less environments when only the cell loss ratio (CLR) parameter is relevant. The convolution algorithm is a good solution for CAC in ATM networks with small buffers. If the source characteristics are known, the actual CLR can be very well estimated. Furthermore, this estimation is always conservative, allowing the retention of the network performance guarantees. Several experiments have been carried out and investigated to explain the deviation between the proposed method and the simulation. Time parameters for burst length and different buffer sizes have been considered. Experiments to confine the limits of the burst length with respect to the buffer size conclude that a minimum buffer size is necessary to achieve adequate cell contention. Note that propagation delay is a no dismiss limit for long distance and interactive communications, then small buffer must be used in order to minimise delay. Under previous premises, the convolution approach is the most accurate method used in bandwidth allocation. This method gives enough accuracy in both homogeneous and heterogeneous networks. But, the convolution approach has a considerable computation cost and a high number of accumulated calculations. To overcome this drawbacks, a new method of evaluation is analysed: the Enhanced Convolution Approach (ECA). In ECA, traffic is grouped in classes of identical parameters. By using the multinomial distribution function instead of the formula-based convolution, a partial state corresponding to each class of traffic is obtained. Finally, the global state probabilities are evaluated by multi-convolution of the partial results. This method avoids accumulated calculations and saves storage requirements, specially in complex scenarios. Sorting is the dominant factor for the formula-based convolution, whereas cost evaluation is the dominant factor for the enhanced convolution. A set of cut-off mechanisms are introduced to reduce the complexity of the ECA evaluation. The ECA also computes the CLR for each j-class of traffic (CLRj), an expression for the CLRj evaluation is also presented. We can conclude that by combining the ECA method with cut-off mechanisms, utilisation of ECA in real-time CAC environments as a single level scheme is always possible.