High-performance portable

One of the lessons learned in the 1990s was that the enormous need for high-performance portable power is not diminishing. Consumer electronics continues to be a vibrant, worldwide market force, leading to ever-increasing demands for portable power. The inability of lithium ion batteries to fully satisfy consumer electronics has been one of the principal motivations for the dramatic rise in fuelcell research and development. As the dimensions of devices continue to shrink, the question arises as to... 

Miniaturisation and automatisation of analytical and bioanalytical systems have had a great development in the last decade. The final goal of miniaturised devices is represented by micro-total analysis systems (g-TAS), also called lab-on-a-chip (LOC). These devices bring advantages in terms of mass production, low cost and disposability as well as speed, high performance, portability and low energy requirements. 

Fig. 7.39. Five high-performance portable liquid nitrogen vessels with capacities from 3 to 34 liters (courtesy of Taylor-Wharton, Division of Harsco Corporation).

Other types of small portable vessels find applications in the laboratory or in small workshops. They may be constructed of glass, metal, or a combination of the two. The all-glass dewars are typically evacuated to about 1.3 X 10 MPa and most are coated with a thin silver film in the vacuum space to minimize radiant heat transfer. The size of these glass containers usually ranges from 0.04 to 0.3 m in diameter and up to 2 m in length. Contemporary metal dewars have either an aluminum or stainless steel inner product container with MLI in the vacuum space. Loss rates from 1.5% to 4% per day are typical. However, high performance portable Uquid nitrogen vessels like the ones iUustrated in Fig. 7.39 have loss rates as low as 0.3 % per day. 

W. T. Rankin and J. A. Board, Jr., A Portable Distributed Implementation of the Parallel Multipole Tree Algorithm, Proceedings, Fourth IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing, IEEE Computer Society Press (1995), pp. 17-22. 

Rankin, W., Board, J. A portable distributed implementation of the parallel multipole tree algorithm. IEEE Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing. Duke University Technical Report 95-002. 

Trinitrotoluene and RDX have been determined in soil using a field-portable continuous-flow immunosensor. Results agreed with those obtained by high-performance liquid chromatography [255,256]. 

With the advantage of small size, low cost, ease of integration and automation, microfluidics technology is expected to revolutionize the food industry with portable, inexpensive, and high-performance protein-based devices. 

The rare earth based metal hydrides AB5 have proven to be best suited for use in the negative electrode in NiMH batteries. The market demand for the nickel-metal hydride battery is high because of the rapid demand for portable electronics goods such as video cameras, shavers, power tools, cellular phones, lap-top computers which use high performance batteries. 

The ELISA tests are preferred because they require low volume of the sample and fewer clean-up procedures of the extracted sample compared to the conventional methods like TLC (thin layer chromatography) and HPLC (high-performance liquid chromatography). ELISA tests are rapid, simple, specific, sensitive and portable for use in the field for the detection of mycotoxins in foods and fodder (Zheng et al. 2005). 

TLC is still used in many pharmaceutical laboratories in either manual or semi-automatic operation on conventional, high performance or modified stationary phases [9, 10, 126]. TLC offers a quick, inexpensive, flexible and portable technique that has been the subject of some recent new developments. 

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