DEPENDENCE BETWEEN FUSION TEMPERATURES AND CHEMICAL COMPONENTS OF A CERTAIN TYPE OF COAL USING CLASSICAL,NON-PARAMETRIC AND BOOTSTRAP TECHNIQUES

A statistical study of the dependence between various critical fusion temperatures of a certain kind ofcoal and its chemical components is carried out.As well as using classical dependence techniques(multiple,stepwise and PLS regression,principal components,canonical correlation,etc.)together withthe corresponding inference on the parameters of interest,non-parametric regression and bootstrapinference are also performed.     

SHORT COMMUNICATION SOL1:A PROGRAM FOR THE SIMULATION OF COMPLEX EQUILIBRIA USING A PERSONAL COMPUTER

The program SOL1,written in Turbo-PASCAL for use on a personal computers(IBM-PC orcompatible),has been developed for calculating the equilibrium concentrations of the species inmulticomponent ligand-metal mixtures of up to 21 components and 150 species.The main features arethe easy data input system,the possibility of three different tasks(calculating the composition of a singlesolution,simulating titration curves and calculating the species distribution as a function of pH)andprocedures for drawing the calculated curves on Roland DXY plotters.The program has been tested by astudy of six different complex systems.     

CHARACTERIZATION OF FOODS BY INEXACT RULES:THE SEXIA EXPERT SYSTEM

SEXIA is an expert system that uses a new methodological approach to identify foods,particularly oliveoils according to varieties,olive zones and denominations of origin.The methodological approachprovides identification tools,associating a confidence degree or a belief interval to the final hypotheses.The certainty factor and the Dempster-Shaffer theory,with some modifications,have been implementedin SEXIA.The computer can work with 50 chemical parameters whose data have previously beenacquired by the food analyst via a dialogue in the Spanish language.The system has been verified with144 olive oil samples.In this paper some results obtained for distinguishing the Arbequina variety fromother varieties using SEXIA and the BMDP stepwise discriminant analysis program are presented.Finally,promising directions for future research are suggested.     

A study on zinc speciation of Tungabhadra River sediments,Kurnool, south India: A tool in metal pollution monitoring

The Tungabhadra River is one of the sacred rivers in south India. Industrial and mining operations on its banks generate enormous amounts of effluent that have led to substantial metal and nutrient contamination of the aquatic system. In the present investigation an attempt has been made to assess variation in the physico-chemical characteristics and speciation of zinc in the water and sediment of the Tungabhadra River. Most of the metal ions in the collected samples were in high concentrations compared to the applicable standards. The Individual Contamination Factor (ICF) of Zn was found to be more at Site-B compared to sites A and C. Zinc-bearing particles were characterized by the different morphologies measuring from large colloidal to small particles which were associated with biological structures or may be present in amorphous nature which were observed by Transition electron microscopy (TEM) with X-EDS (Energy dispersive spectrometry). In conclusion, the level of Zn contamination in the Tungabhadra River is increasing at an alarming rate due to industrial activities.     

USE OF THE KALMAN FILTER FOR MULTIVARIATE CALIBRATION IN A REAL SYSTEM AND ITS COMPARISON WITH CLS AND PURE COMPONENT CALIBRATION METHODS

The usefulness of the Kalman filter as an algorithm for calibration in a real system is shown. Results arecompared with classical least squares and pure component calibration. The prediction of four prioritypollutant chlorophenols in binary, ternary and quaternary mixtures was also carried out by Kalmanfiltering. The condition number, standard deviation and prediction error have been employed to choosethe most suitable wavelength range. Comparison of the standard error of prediction in the validation setshows significant differences between the evaluated chlorophenols, the best results being obtained withKalman multivariate calibration.